Oceanographic changes in the North Pacific Ocean over the past century recorded in deep-water gorgonian corals

Tracking the record of sewage discharge off Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, since 1950, using stable isotope records from antipatharians

“…Although some of the δ 13 C records remain essentially unchanged from 1950 to the present, most of them show a steady decrease of about 1 ‰, accelerating over the past 20 yr. Part of this change may be attributed to the oceanic Suess effect, in which surface waters of the world have become gradually depleted in δ 13 C from the uptake of isotopically depleted anthropogenic CO 2. Similar patterns of decreasing δ 13 C have been measured in antipatharian and gorgonian corals from the Northwest Atlantic (Sherwood et al 2005b, Williams et al 2007a) and Northeast Pacific (Williams et al 2007b). Sediment cores recovered from the Gulf of Aqaba showed a decrease of 0.63 ‰ in the δ 13 C of planktonic foraminifera over the past 200 yr (Al-Rousan et al 2004).…”

Twentieth century <i>δ</i><sup>13</sup>C variability in surface water dissolved inorganic carbon recorded by coralline algae in the northern North Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea

“…In addition, skeletal δ 13 C values from available marine proxy records decreased at a rate exceeding that of instrumental records. In a gorgonian soft coral in the Alaskan stream, δ 13 C values declined at a rate of 0.015‰ yr −1 (Williams et al, 2007). However, this is the only record available from sessile organisms in the northern North Pacific.…”

Reproducibility of trace element profiles in a specimen of the deep-water bamboo coral Keratoisis sp.

“…Their trunks grow radially by between 33 and 300 lm/year (Sánchez et al, 2004;Thresher et al, 2004Thresher et al, , 2009Roark et al, 2005;Noé and Dullo, 2006;Andrews et al, 2009;Sherwood and Edinger, 2009;Thresher, 2009), and individuals can live for centuries (Thresher et al, 2004). Most importantly, the internodes are primarily calcite and lack the alternating organic layers that make analysing and interpreting the skeletons of Primnoidae coral skeletons more complex (Bond et al, 2005;Sherwood et al, 2005b;Williams et al, 2007). Trace element inclusions in the calcite are beginning to find application as decadal-resolution paleoceanographic tracers (Hill et al, 2005;Roark et al, 2005;Thresher, 2009;Thresher et al, 2009Thresher et al, , 2010.…”