Scientists Race To Save Miami Coral Doomed By Dredging

An anonymous reader writes "Miami scientists are scrambling to rescue a crop of coral at the bottom of one of the world's busiest shipping channels that they say could hold clues about climate change. 'The coral, which may hold clues about how sea life adapts to climate change, is growing in Government Cut. The channel, created more than a century ago, leads to PortMiami and is undergoing a $205 million dredging project — scheduled to begin Saturday — to deepen the sea floor by about 10 feet in time for a wave of new monster cargo ships cruising through an expanded Panama Canal starting in 2015. Endangered coral and larger coral have already been removed by a team hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing the dredging work. But the remaining coral, deemed "corals of opportunity" in Corps lingo, can be retrieved with a permit. The problem, scientists say, is they only had 12 days between when the permits were issued last month and the start of dredging, not nearly enough time to save the unusual colonies thriving in Government Cut.'"

Comments

Re:Mass extinction waits for no-one

[DiamondGeezer]

Your statement is one large fallacy: Post hoc ergo propter hoc "It came after therefore it was caused by"

The CO2 changes in the atmosphere are neither rapid nor unprecedented. Also, the clear witness of ice cores is that rises and falls in CO2 in the atmosphere are a centuries delayed response to climatic warming and cooling. Since 97% of CO2 is from natural sources, the man-made contribution is tiny compared to the natural evolution of CO2 from our oceans which originated in the Medieval Warm Period.

Using Henry's Law only works if there is carbon dioxide equilibrium between the ocean and the atmosphere. There isn't.