” This is a hidden vulnerability,” stated Cardenas, a professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences. “Weve been able to show with this site that groundwater becomes part of these delicate reef environments. There is a connection, and thats still not as accepted in science and in many parts of the world.”
Bayani Cardenas, a teacher at the University of Texas Jackson School of Geosciences, prepares to dive throughout research study to track the effect of damaging nutrients streaming through groundwater into a fragile reef sanctuary in the Philippines. Credit: University of Texas at Austin,
More than that, Cardenas stated the research has led to new questions– and new research proposals– about the incredibly corals they found that could be reproduced somewhere else in the coming years as worldwide CO2 levels are anticipated to increase.
Coral reefs have long been suffering due to environment modification, most significantly throughout an international coral whitening occasion from 2014 to 2017 that caused heat stress to 75% of the worlds reefs, according to the American Meteorological Society. Yet the coral-filled location Cardenas studied in the Verde Island Passage in the Philippines, an area so dynamic and varied that he refers to it as the “Amazon of the ocean,” is growing in spite of the huge amounts of CO2 being pumped in from groundwater.
Lead author Rogger E. Correa, a researcher at Southern Cross University in Australia, estimated that groundwater is pumping about 989 grams of CO2 per square meter annually into the area they studied, which is referred to as “Twin Rocks” and surrounds a chain of volcanoes. Thats the equivalent of parking two vehicles on the seabed and letting them give off co2 for a complete year on every hectare of reef.
To differentiate groundwater from seawater, the researchers immersed devices that measure the levels of CO2 and radon 222, a naturally happening radioactive isotope that is discovered in local groundwater however not in open ocean water. The measurement method was established by co-author Isaac Santos, a teacher at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
This work follows a 2020 study carried out by Cardenas where he discovered CO2 bubbling up from the seafloor off a location of the Philippine coast so drastically that he dubbed it “Soda Springs.”
The end arise from the most recent examination is an entire area of reef that need to be studied more closely, said Cardenas, who is a geoscientist and not a coral scientist.
Adina Paytan, a research researcher at the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not associated with the research study, cautioned that other human-made stress factors, consisting of contamination, sedimentation and overfishing, can still doom reef. She was heartened that Cardenas group showed corals can grow in high-carbon environments, a finding that “offers some hope for the future of corals.”
Reference: “Submarine Groundwater Discharge Releases CO2 to a Coral Reef” by Rogger E. Correa, M. Bayani Cardenas, Raymond S. Rodolfo, Mark R. Lapus, Kay L. Davis, Anna B. Giles, Jose C. Fullon, Mithra-Christin Hajati, Nils Moosdorf, Christian J. Sanders and Isaac R. Santos, 4 August 2021, ACS ES&T Water.DOI: 10.1021/ acsestwater.1 c00104.
Study co-authors consisted of researchers from the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) in Germany; the State Office for Mining, Energy and Geology in Germany; and the following institutions in the Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University, Agricultural Sustainability Initiatives for Nature Inc., and Planet Dive Resort.
Corals discovered in a location of the ocean with exceptionally high levels of Carbon Dioxide in the Verde Island Passage in the Philippines. Credit: University of Texas at Austin,
In 2019, a hydrology professor at The University of Texas at Austin set out on a research study job to see if he might identify harmful nutrients flowing through groundwater into a delicate coral reef sanctuary in the Philippines. He attained this goal, however following the long history of accidental clinical discoveries, he rather came across something totally unforeseen: a region of possible “extremely corals” that are growing regardless of high levels of carbon dioxide.
The findings based on the 2019 field work were released in August in the journal ACS ES&T Water.
For the very first time, the UT Austin teacher, Bayani Cardenas, and a team of international researchers had the ability to associate the source of CO2 and other gases and nutrients in seawater at this area to groundwater, a finding that the scientists believe programs how the undersea reef environment can be vulnerable to the method communities release wastewater, farming runoff and other by-products into the sea.