Among the myriad creatures that populate our ocean, some stand out as having an outsized impact on the marine environment—shaping and maintaining habitats that themselves sustain countless other forms ...

Beneath the soft bodies of scleractinian, or stony corals, polyps secrete a calcium carbonate skeleton, and it is this skeleton that becomes the foundation of coral reef ecosystems. Coral colonies ...

Coral reefs are rich sources of food and nutrition for marine animals and humans as well. However, when these underwater coral polyps, largely made of calcium carbonate, are destroyed, it affects ...

In the reef-building "hard corals", the polyps sit in a carbonate coral skeleton, which over time builds the fabric of the reef. Coral reefs are like cities under the sea. The structure of the ...

However, empirical data describing the carbonate chemistry at cold-water coral reefs are very rare. Regions of the upper slope of the Northern Gulf of Mexico harbor several deep-water reefs structured ...

Coral reefs are made up of colonies of hundreds to thousands of tiny individual corals, called polyps. These marine invertebrate animals have hard exoskeletons made of calcium carbonate, and are ...

The polyps produce a hard outer skeleton made of calcium carbonate, each laying down a hexagon-shaped ... corals gradually build up the complex three-dimensional structure of a reef. This habitable ...

A research team has shown that methanogens, micro-organisms ubiquitous in low-oxygen environments like aquifers, soil and even permafrost, can propel their growth by dissolving calcium carbonate ...