Spatial and temporal distribution of cold-water corals in the Northeast Atlantic Ocean over the last 150 thousand years

• Published in: Deep Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers
• Main Authors: Ferreira, Maria Luiza de Carvalho, Robinson, Laura F., Stewart, Joseph A., Li, Tao, Chen, Tianyu, Burke, Andrea, Kitahara, Marcelo, White, Nicholas J.
• Other Authors: University of St Andrews. School of Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of St Andrews. St Andrews Isotope Geochemistry
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: U-Th dating; Coral biogeography; Northeast Atlantic; Last glaciation; Last deglaciation; Holocene; GC Oceanography; DAS; SDG 13 - Climate Action; SDG 14 - Life Below Water; AC; GC; Hines; Reykjanes
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/26545; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dsr.2022.103892

Authors acknowledge the crew and researchers on board the research cruises JC142 (Tropic Seamount in 2016; project ‘MarineE-tech’; grants NE/M011186/1, awarded to B. Murton and NE/M011151/1, awarded to P. Lusty), JC094 (Equatorial Atlantic in 2013) and CE08-06 (Reykjanes Ridge in 2008) who obtained the samples for this study. We thank Christopher Coath, Carolyn Taylor and Yun-Ju Sun for their help with laboratory work. We thank the editors, Sophia Hines, and two other reviewers for their comments which considerably improved this manuscript. Funding was provided by NERC grants awarded to L.F.R. (NE/S001743/1 and NE/R005117/1) and by Schlumberger Foundation who provided the PhD scholarship “Faculty for the Future Fellowship”. M.V.K. acknowledges the support from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP #2017/50229-5) and from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq #301436/2018-5). Scleractinian cold-water corals are found across the Northeast Atlantic, providing structure for important habitats that support high biodiversity. Climate-driven perturbations on parameters such as carbonate chemistry, oxygen, bottom currents, productivity and temperature have the potential to impact the abundance and diversity of these cold-water coral communities. One way to explore the linkage between corals and climate is to examine historic coral distributions during times of past climate change. Previous coral dating efforts in the Northeast Atlantic (n ∼ 700) have focused on reef-forming colonial coral communities from shelf and slope areas. However, there are far fewer data from open-ocean settings or from solitary coral species, thus precluding assessment of basin-wide controls on coral occurrence. Here, we contribute >600 new U-series ages for both solitary and colonial coral species from open-ocean sites including the Reykjanes Ridge and seamounts in the mid and low latitudes to map the changing distribution of Northeast Atlantic cold-water corals over the last 150,000 years. The ...