Thursday, 16 November 2006, 1:15 PM Refreshments, 1:30 - 2:30 PM Talk

Occurrence and health of modern coral reefs worldwide have dramatically declined in the past decades and their future is predicted to be bleak. Local and regional stresses caused by direct human activities, such as among them physical destruction, increase turbidity and nutrients, and over fishing, can explain their decline in close proximity of human population concentrations. Global atmospheric carbon dioxide increase and related sea surface temperature rise in the past decades have negatively influenced the overall health of coral reefs. These stress factors are predicted to have in the next decades an even stronger global impact on coral reefs.

In the past, Earth global climate has changed at time scales ranging from millions of years to decades. Coral reefs had to adapt to those dramatic environmental modifications. Past examples of coral reef adaptation help understand their overall resiliency and perhaps their overall high diversity, but offer little hope for their immediate future in a human time scale point of view.

André W. Droxler is currently a Professor at Rice University in the Earth Science Department. He was born and raised in Switzerland. He received first a Diploma (equivalent to a Master’s degree) from University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland) in 1978 and pursued his graduate studies at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (RSMAS) - University of Miami (Florida) where he was awarded in 1984 a Ph. D. degree in Marine Geology. Following some post doctoral research years first at RSMAS and then at University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, he became a faculty member in January 1987 at Rice University, where is has been there since.