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

拟议的项目将首次对北大西洋冷水珊瑚（CWC）生长的环境边界条件进行广泛评估，以响应当前和过去的海洋条件。此外，我们将研究cwc作为全流域中间水质量变化的气候档案的潜力。用相同的工具收集的跨大西洋数据集的比较将产生关于深海健康珊瑚/珊瑚礁生长所需的环境条件的详细信息。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很大的提高，但对大西洋西侧化学武器的研究却很少。特别是“长期”测量的应用为水文控制提供了新的见解，这对生长和发生非常重要。此外，水文和环境信号也记录在化武坑的骨架上，这些骨架形成了土丘和珊瑚礁，其中一些高达100米。对Lophelia pertusa等化学化学生物的地球化学研究表明，这些生物具有作为中深层水体环境参数的高分辨率档案的潜力。然而，由于没有像浅水珊瑚那样适用的直接温度方程，因此很难将δ18O和δ13C等已建立的代用物与温度进行关联。因此，还需要对代理校准进行新的研究。

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.