Deep beneath the ocean surface, the dead coral skeletons that form the foundation of cold-water reefs are dissolving and crumbling as seawater becomes more acidic. This project will create 3D-printed calcium carbonate ‘mini-reefs’ and computer models to quantify exactly how fast these habitats collapse. Cold-water coral ecosystems support a wide range of marine life, but their depth and inaccessibility make them difficult to study directly. Most research has focused on how ocean acidification harms living coral. Yet the dead coral skeleton makes up the bulk of these reefs and houses much of their biodiversity. As acidification increases the skeleton’s porosity—a process called coralporosis—the structure can no longer support the weight of live coral above it, causing the entire habitat to crumble. If successful, this research will produce the first computer-based model that can predict how much cold-water coral habitat will be lost under different climate scenarios, and on what timescale. This would give marine managers and policymakers concrete data to inform conservation priorities for these deep-sea ecosystems. The work is fundamental science—it addresses a basic gap in understanding how reef-scale structures respond to chemical change—but it directly underpins future decisions about protecting biodiversity hotspots that are currently invisible to most people.
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In this project we will use a novel approach with 3D printed calcium carbonate ‘mini-reefs’ to visualise how vulnerable cold-water coral habitats will collapse in response to ocean acidification. This will be combined with unique existing evidence by the project team to create the first in silico (computer based) model of cold-water coral reefs, where future habitat loss and timescales of such loss can be quantified. Cold-water corals form large yet fragile ecosystems that support a wide range of biodiversity. Due to their depth and inaccessibility, these important, biodiversity-supporting habitats are hard to study directly, and as such face major challenges in their future protection. This creates a significant challenge in determining their tolerance to environmental change, and efforts to date have largely focussed on the environmental impacts to the live coral. However, of increasing concern is the impact of ocean acidification to the dead coral skeletons that form the foundation of these structurally complex habitats. Ocean acidification leads to the dissolution of dead coral skeletons and crumbling of the 3D reef structures they make through the process of coralporosis. As the dead coral becomes more porous, they become unable to support the weight of the live coral above them, leading to habitat crumbling. As the dead coral skeleton forms the major component of most cold-water coral ecosystems, and is where a significant amount of the biodiversity in these ecosystems is found, its loss fundamentally changes the function of these habitats. The project team has led the research characterising coralporosis and has substantial evidence on this process and timescales based upon experimentation of small coral colonies. To upscale this understanding to reef-scales, the team will create replicable ‘mini-reefs’ using new 3D printing methodology where 3D prints can be made entirely from 100% calcium carbonate. These mini-reefs will be created in a variety of formats to represent the natural variability of cold-water coral habitat structures, and will be based upon our existing database of computed tomography images of coral skeletons. We will subject these mini-reefs to acidification conditions to quantify how much habitable volume is lost (i.e. the spaces within the framework), and how quickly this loss occurs. We will create in silico models that will be validated against this experimental data (which includes structural and mechanical analysis) and existing coralporosis data acquired by the project team in August 2024 (through a Diamond Light Source synchrotron grant to analyse long-term coral experiment samples). These computational models will allow us to quantify how projected climate change scenarios will lead to habitat loss over known timescales. This approach will greatly increase our understanding of what CWC reefs of the future will look like, when these changes may occur on an ecosystem scale, and how quickly that will happen.
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