The Adventures of Elizabeth Kolbert and the Fall of Coral Reefs

Dropping Acid begins with the author, Elizabeth Kolbert, visiting One Tree Island, a small patch of land at the southernmost end of the Great Barrier Reef.  She arrives to a very bare bones research station with only two labs, some cabins, and an outhouse, and inside the cabins are small taglines inscribed on the wall from past research teams.  She then talks about how even sixty years after the Great Barrier Reef was discovered by Captain James Cook in 1770, how they formed was still a complete mystery.  That is, until Charles Darwin began to theorize about the subject in The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs in 1842, and even these theories weren’t wholly accepted until the 1950’s.

The way reefs form is through a process known as calcification, which is essentially the hardening of tissue to form a structure.  Coral does this a little differently, though.  They work as a group and calcify on top of one another, slowly building and forming a reef.  They all grow within 30 degrees north and 30 degrees south of the equator.  The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest reef, stretching more that 1,500 miles and at some points being more than 500 feet thick!  This massive expanse of billions of tiny polyps, the name for an individual coral, provides an environment for hundreds of thousands of species.  Sadly, scientists predict that coral reefs may become the first major ecosystem in the modern world to become extinct.  Even though corals seem to be solid and hardy, researchers explain that if current trends continue until 2050, all you’ll be able to see are large piles of rubble that are rapidly eroding away. 

Originally, Kolbert was supposed to stay on the larger island, known as Heron Island, that was close to One Tree.  However, when she arrived at Heron, the plexiglass dome that would allow them to manipulate CO₂ levels in the water wasn’t even close to being finished.  Once she heard about the separate expedition to One Tree Island, it only took her three days to find a boat to take her there.  The goal of the experiment on One Tree Island, was to measure the properties of water at various tides and compare it to the same data that Donald Kinsley collected in the 1970’s (Donald Kinsley was an Australian researcher who set up the site at One Tree).  Kolbert made her first trip to collect samples at around 9 PM with the head-researcher, Ken Caldeira, who made special note to warn her about falling through the “pie crust,” which is what the researchers called the thin, brittle surface of the reef.

The first evidence that CO₂ could affect coral reefs came from Arizona, in a place known as Biosphere 2.  The results stated that corals grew best in water with an aragonite saturation state of 4 to 5, and current trends predict that by 2060, there won’t be a place that’s above 3.5.  As these saturation states fall, the energy that’s needed to calcify will increase and there’ll be less calcification. 

One of the cool things that Kolbert talks about is the “mass spawning” of coral, which happens every full moon.  Under normal conditions, coral reproduce asexually by budding, a process in which a mother organism creates an exact copy of itself.  According to Kolbert, on the big night, the coral develop what look like goosebumps, which are actually are actually the egg-sperm bundles bulging from the polyps.  The bundles then burst, spilling out into the water around them, and fertilized each other, forming little, pink larvae. 

The biggest point that jumped out to me is that coral reefs are actually going extinct.  I thought that coral would be able to “survive” for a decent amount of time without building on itself, like a rock being eroded very slowly in water.  Apparently, the opposite is true.  The fact that by 2050 the coral reefs will be no more than piles of rubble is very frightening, because it’s not just the coral that’s affected.  As Kolbert said above, hundreds of thousands of species call the reefs their home, what happens if their home disappears this quickly?  Humanity as a whole has continuously ignored the signs that these massive, gorgeous hubs of life are being destroyed, and these studies have been going on since the late 20^th century.  The only one who can fix this is us and, currently, we are not doing enough.