By Richard Foot
A little-known marine organism on Canada's East Coast contains what a team of U.S. and Canadian scientists believes is a rich, untapped archive of temperature data, which could vastly improve the world's understanding of climate change.
Scientists spent the past summer on an expedition ship along the coast of Newfoundland, scuba diving in shallow, inshore waters to collect samples of coralline algae, one of the longest-living marine life forms on the planet.
Corallines — specifically Clathromorphum compactum — are a pinkish, coral-like plant that cover parts of the rocky bottom of the coastal sections of the Labrador Sea. They can grow forever, if left undisturbed, and, like trees, their age can be precisely measured by a careful reading of growth bands.
Jochen Halfar, a professor and geologist at the University of Toronto, and Walter Adey, a geobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, who is considered the world's leading expert on corallines, both say these small, innocuous plants hold the key to learning how ocean temperatures have changed over time in the Arctic and sub-Arctic, a critical region of rapid climate change.
Scientists have spent years scouring the Earth for sources of proxy temperature data that can offer clues to how the global climate has changed over the course of history.
Tree ring samples are used to show temperature and moisture changes on land, while core samples from coral reefs give clues to climate conditions in the ocean.
The influential reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have used studies of trees and corals to reconstruct how global temperatures might have changed over many centuries.
Coral, however, only grows in the tropics. Elsewhere — in areas such as the Labrador Sea between Greenland and Canada, where coral reefs don't exist, there have been few reliable ways of measuring long-term ocean temperatures, until now.
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Handout photo, Walter Adey
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