Living fossils: Climate Change Threatens to Dissolve the Ocean's Deep-Water Corals

摘要

"Back conus are one of ilie oldest continuously living organisms on earth," J. Murray Roberts, a marine biologist with the Scottish Association for Marine Science, tells me eagerly. "Some are 4,000 years old." They are but one of a family of corals, some of which, Roberts explains, may be 1.5 to 2 million years old. These ancient, fantastically branched, intricately sculptural sea creatures live not in balmy, sunlit tropical waters but in cold, dark ocean depths of up to 13,000 feet, where temperatures can drop to 39° F. "Far too deep for diving," Roberts explains. The foundations of the deep-sea corals living today were laid down during the last Ice Age; some live on giant carbonate mounds first established in the Pleistocene Era. They are literally living fossils.