Abstract
As the world’s largest reservoir of exchangeable carbon on millennial timescales, the oceans play a dominant role in global change. Indeed, the oceans currently act as a major sink for anthropogenic carbon (1), partially moderating increases in atmospheric CO2 at the expense of a more acidic ocean. One of the great challenges for the next century is understanding how this shift in seawater chemistry will affect marine systems. Serving as a vivid microcosm for the ocean as whole, coral reefs display the beauty, diversity, and complexity of the ocean, while also exhibiting the ocean’s sensitivity to environmental perturbations. Built from a framework of CaCO3 skeletons, coral reefs are particularly sensitive to ocean acidification because acidified seawater tends to slow skeletal growth (2). Despite the threat posed by ocean acidification to reef health, the detailed mechanisms responsible for this sensitivity are still poorly understood. In PNAS, Venn et al. (3) address a key component of this problem, providing a detailed view of the chemical-scale changes that link coral skeletal growth and ocean acidification.
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