Aprubt climate change events in the Northeastern Atlantic Ocean

The western Iberian margin has been one of the key locations to study abrupt glacial climate change and associated interhemispheric linkages. The regional variability in the response to those events is being studied by combining a multitude of published and new records. Looking at the trend from Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 10 to 2, the planktic foraminifer data, conform with the alkenone record of Martrat et al. [2007], shows that abrupt climate change events, especially the Heinrich events, became more frequent and their impacts in general stronger during the last glacial cycle. However, there were two older periods with strong impacts on the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC): the Heinrich-type event associated with Termination (T) IV and the one occurring during MIS 8 (269 to 265 ka). During the Heinrich stadials of the last glacial cycle, the polar front reached the northern Iberian margin (ca. 41°N), while the arctic front was located in the vicinity of 39°N. During all the glacial periods studied, there existed a boundary at the latter latitude, either the arctic front during extreme cold events or the subarctic front during less strong coolings or warmer glacials. Along with these fronts sea surface temperatures (SST) increased southward by about 1°C per one degree of latitude leading to steep temperature gradients in the eastern North Atlantic and pointing to a close vicinity between subpolar and subtropical waters. The southern Iberian margin was always bathed by subtropical water masses - surface and/ or subsurface ones -, but there were periods when these waters also penetrated northward to 40.6°N. Glacial hydrographic conditions were similar during MIS 2 and 4, but much different during MIS 6. MIS 6 was a warmer glacial with the polar front being located further to the north allowing the subtropical surface and subsurface waters to reach at minimum as far north as 40.6°N and resulting in relative stable conditions on the southern margin. In the vertical structure, the Greenland-type climate oscillations during the last glacial cycle were recorded down to 2465 m during the Heinrich stadials, i.e. slightly deeper than in the western basin. This deeper boundary is related to the admixing of Mediterranean Outflow Water, which also explains the better ventilation of the intermediate-depth water column on the Iberian margin. This compilation revealed that latitudinal, longitudinal and vertical gradients existed in the waters along the Iberian margin, i.e. in a relative restricted area, but sufficient paleo-data exists now to validate regional climate models for abrupt climate change events in the northeastern North Atlantic Ocean.

Occurrence (presence-only) of living Lophelia pertusa reefs in the Irish continental margin

The present data set was used as a training set for a Habitat Suitability Model. It contains occurrence (presence-only) of living Lophelia pertusa reefs in the Irish continental margin, which were assembled from databases, cruise reports and publications. A total of 4423 records were inspected and quality assessed to ensure that they (1) represented confirmed living L. pertusa reefs (so excluding 2900 records of dead and isolated coral colony records); (2) were derived from sampling equipment that allows for accurate (<200 m) geo-referencing (so excluding 620 records derived mainly from trawling and dredging activities); and (3) were not duplicated. A total of 245 occurrences were retained for the analysis. Coral observations are highly clustered in regions targeted by research expeditions, which might lead to falsely inflated model evaluation measures (Veloz, 2009). Therefore, we coarsened the distribution data by deleting all but one record within grid cells of 0.02° resolution (Davies & Guinotte 2011). The remaining 53 points were subject to a spatial cross-validation process: a random presence point was chosen, grouped with its 12 closest neighbour presence points based on Euclidean distance and withheld from model training. This process was repeated for all records, resulting in 53 replicates of spatially non-overlapping sets of test (n=13) and training (n=40) data. The final 53 occurrence records were used for model training.

Acclimatization to high-variance habitats does not enhance physiological tolerance of two key Caribbean corals to future temperature and pH

Corals are acclimatized to populate dynamic habitats that neighbour coral reefs. Habitats such as seagrass beds exhibit broad diel changes in temperature and pH that routinely expose corals to conditions predicted for reefs over the next 50-100 years. However, whether such acclimatization effectively enhances physiological tolerance to, and hence provides refuge against, future climate scenarios remains unknown. Also, whether corals living in low-variance habitats can tolerate present-day high-variance conditions remains untested. We experimentally examined how pH and temperature predicted for the year 2100 affects the growth and physiology of two dominant Caribbean corals (Acropora palmata and Porites astreoides) native to habitats with intrinsically low (outer-reef terrace, LV) and/or high (neighbouring seagrass, HV) environmental variance. Under present-day temperature and pH, growth and metabolic rates (calcification, respiration and photosynthesis) were unchanged for HV versus LV populations. Superimposing future climate scenarios onto the HV and LV conditions did not result in any enhanced tolerance to colonies native to HV. Calcification rates were always lower for elevated temperature and/or reduced pH. Together, these results suggest that seagrass habitats may not serve as refugia against climate change if the magnitude of future temperature and pH changes is equivalent to neighbouring reef habitats.