Hydrography and cold-water coral geochemistry in the Gulf of Mexico and adjacent waters

拟议的项目将首次在北大西洋范围内对冷水珊瑚生长的环境边界条件进行评估，以应对现在和过去的海洋条件。此外，我们还将研究CWCS作为流域范围中等水团变率气候档案的潜力。对使用相同工具收集的数据集进行的跨大西洋比较将提供关于深海珊瑚/珊瑚礁健康生长所需的环境条件的详细信息。尽管在过去的几年里，人们对东北大西洋化学武器产状及其生物、地球化学、地质和水文边界条件的认识有了极大的增长，但对大西洋西侧的化学武器公约的研究却更加稀少。特别是，“长期”测量的应用提供了关于水文控制的新见解，这对生长和发生非常重要。此外，水文和环境信号被记录在CWCS的骨架中，这些骨骼形成了丘陵和珊瑚礁，其中一些高达数百米。对Pophelia pertusa等CWCS的地球化学研究表明，这些生物有可能成为中、深层水团环境参数的高分辨率档案。然而，δ18O和δ13C等已建立的指标与温度之间的关联是困难的，因为没有适用于浅水珊瑚的直接温度方程。因此，关于代理校准的新研究仍然是需要的。

The proposed project will enable for the first time a North Atlantic wide assessment of the environmental boundary conditions of cold‐water coral (CWC) growth in response to present and past oceanographic conditions. Furthermore we will investigate the potential of CWCs as climatic archives of basin‐wide intermediate water mass variability. The trans‐Atlantic comparison of data sets collected with identical tools will yield detailed information on the environmental conditions needed for healthy coral/coral‐reef growth in the deep. While the past years have yielded an enormous increase in knowledge on NE Atlantic CWC occurrences and their biological, geochemical, geological, and hydrographic boundary conditions, studies on CWCs on the western side of the Atlantic have been more sparse. Especially the application of ‘long‐term’ measurements provides new insights with respect to hydrographic controls which are of great importance for growth and occurrences. Furthermore, hydrographic and environmental signals are recorded in the skeletons of CWCs which form mounds and reefs, some of them reaching several 100 m of elevation. Geochemical investigations on CWCs such as Lophelia pertusa indicate the potential of these organisms as high‐resolution archives of environmental parameters of intermediate and deeper water masses. However, the correlation of established proxies such as δ18O and δ13C with temperature is difficult since there is no direct temperature equation applicable as in shallow‐water corals. Hence, new studies regarding proxy calibration are still needed.