Finishing off my experiments in Jerusalem. The right image shows the aragonite skeleton forming under the coral tissue (visible as a grey film just covering the crystals) and the left image shows the distribution of the dye calcein (bright = dye, dark = no dye). Calcein is membrane impermeable and it is present in seawater (bottom left corner) and where seawater has been transported under the tissue (bright ends of some crystals).
21 March 2018 – I’m working at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with Jonathan Erez. We are growing corals over glass slides and using an inverted microscope to study the formation of the aragonite skeleton in real time. 
March 2018 – Out this week in Coral Reefs, our new paper on the coral calcification response to increases in seawater pCO2 and temperature: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00338-018-1672-3?wt_mc=Internal.Event.1.SEM.ArticleAuthorOnlineFirst
I’m having a quiet Monday evening running the ion probe in Edinburgh, looking at the effects of ocean acidification on coral biomineralisation. It’s just me and the corals…
I’ve been interviewed (briefly) by reporter Steph Yin for a New York Times article on coral biomineralisation: In Coral Skeletons, Microscopic Portraits of Resilience? (picture credit: Viacheslav Manichev and Stanislas Von Euw).
NERC have allocated me beamtime at the Ion Microprobe Facility at Edinburgh University to investigate how increasing seawater temperatures and pCO2 affect the chemistry of coral calcification fluids and thereby impact coral reef accretion. Also a big thank you to MASTS for partially funding the purchase of a new dissolved oxygen meter for the coral lab.
I’m co-organising a session at the European Coral Reef Symposium at the University of Oxford. It’s on Mechanistic insights into coral calcification in the context of a global change environment. Abstract submission is open until 30 June 2017.
