Tahiti coral reefs as a natural laboratory for studying coral and microbialite diagenesis, IODP Leg 310 Tahiti Sea Level
Duration:
January 2015
Funding source:
ARC LIEF Collaborating/Partner Organisation Contributions
Corals and reefal microbialites record geochemical archives that can serve as proxies for a variety of environmental parameters, such as sea surface temperature.
However, as carbonate rocks are metastable at the Earth’s surface, they are subject to diagenetic changes that can corrupt or destroy the archives entirely.
This project uses cores of late Pleistocene and Holocene coral reefs recovered from Tahiti during IODP leg 310, to study the effects of marine and meteoric diagenesis on geochemical archives in both corals and microbialites.
