Word: coral
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...list of climate change's victims, you can now add the suffering Gorgonia. Scientists at Spain's Higher Council of Scientific Investigation (CSIC) have discovered that lengthening summers in the Mediterranean are having dire effects on the familiar fan-shaped coral, as well as on many other kinds of marine invertebrates. In a study published April 14 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they argue that for the Gorgonia and its kin, longer summers equal nothing short of mass death...
...Blanchon examined fossil coral reefs about 40 miles south of Cancún on the east coast of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. (The fossils had been exposed during the construction of a new seaside resort.) Working with his co-authors at Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Science, Blanchon calculated the age of the samples by measuring isotopes of thorium in the fossils, a process similar to carbon-dating. The patterns of the fossils indicated points where the coral died when the seas rose too fast for the organisms to adapt; each time the seas stabilized, the corals grew back...
...There are caveats: the interglacial period during which the Mexican coral fossils were deposited was warmer than the world today, and sea levels were as much as 20 ft. (6 m) higher. And other scientists caution that Blanchon's work should still be viewed as preliminary and in need of independent confirmation at other, similar sites where old coral fossils have been deposited. (One obstacle is that only a few places on the earth - the Yucatan peninsula among them - have been seismically calm enough over the past several hundred thousand years to allow for such measurements.) But in the wake...
Marc Joseph grew up here, the Realtor son of a Realtor dad. He watched the market go mad and had his revelation: now is the moment to get back in - and stake your claim. At 41, he did not expect to be driving around Cape Coral in an old church bus that he bought off Craigslist, painted dollar green and emblazoned with the motto "ForeclosureToursRUs.com." But most people had no idea how to buy a house from a bank, and many were too scared to try, so he decided to lead tours of the new economic frontier...
...Each of the hotel's 146 rooms is decorated in soft shades of coral, beige and blue. Well-heeled visitors may want to splash out on the historic first-floor suites, formerly offices where socialist planners met to draft the country's economic policies. Today those rooms boast marble bathrooms, fur throws, 16-ft. (5 m) high ceilings and sweeping views of the Bebelplatz and Humboldt University. There's more behind the luxurious surface: bullets and grenade fragments from World War II remain embedded in the suites' original wood paneling. For more information, visit www.hotelderome.com...