[Coral-List] Why modern coral reefs are the “living dead” and its relevance to Pleistocene climate cycles

[Scott Wooldridge]

Dear fellow Coral Reef researchers,

I have followed with great interest recent threads discussing the relative
importance of “local” versus “global” factors in the recent decline of
tropical coral reef communities.

As my contribution to this debate, I draw attention to the attached
manuscript in press with Coral Reefs which explains the emergent property
of “thermal bleaching risk” in terms of a triune of environmental
thresholds (pCO2, nutrients, light/temperature).

This conception spans across cellular (micron) to global space-scales, and
sub-daily to millennial time-scales. Moreover, it requires the synthesis of
both physiological and geological evidence in an effort to test/validate
the proposed central tenets.

I offer the manuscript forward as my attempt to justify the thesis - that
it is not an “either/or” scenario when it comes to the importance of local
or global factors in attributing causation to the recent (or indeed
previous historical) decline of tropical coral reef communities.

Scott Wooldridge

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Scott_Wooldridge

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317100418_Instability_and_breakdown_of_the_coral-algae_symbiosis_upon_exceedence_of_the_interglacial_pCO2_threshold_260_ppmv_the_%27%27missing%27%27_Earth-System_feedback_mechanism?_iepl%5BviewId%5D=Hf7RhM6omwV0W5NKeiustsM2cgyLODUVfe1l&_iepl%5Bcontexts%5D%5B0%5D=prfhpi&_iepl%5Bdata%5D%5BstandardItemCount%5D=5&_iepl%5Bdata%5D%5BuserSelectedItemCount%5D=5&_iepl%5Bdata%5D%5BtopHighlightCount%5D=1&_iepl%5Bdata%5D%5BstandardItemIndex%5D=1&_iepl%5Bdata%5D%5BstandardItem1of5%5D=1&_iepl%5BtargetEntityId%5D=PB%3A317100418&_iepl%5BinteractionType%5D=publicationTitle