Digging into the geologic record of environmentally driven changes in coral-reef development

This lesson uses data based on real-world geological archives to guide students toward understanding how climate and oceanography have impacted coral-reef growth over the last 5000 years. The objective of the lesson is for students to determine the relationship between environmental variability and coral-reef development over millennial timescales. In this activity, students will:
1. Characterize the species composition and condition of coral reefs from different time periods in the past using cores of reef architecture
2. Calculate the rate of calcium carbonate accretion (production) of the reefs during those past time intervals
3. Reconstruct trends in past climatic conditions using a mock data-set.