Unlocking Mechanisms Shape Tender

Grant agreement ID: 101265957

DOI
10.3030/101265957

EC signature date
21 September 2026
Start date
1 August 2027
End date
31 July 2032
Funded under
European Research Council (ERC)
Objective

Compositional variations in coral skeletons are widely used as proxies of environmental change and are powerful archives of past ocean conditions. However, a limit is placed on their accuracy by ‘vital effects’ – a black box of species- and colony-specific processes tied to coral physiology and biomineralisation that mask and distort the environmental control on skeletal composition. Despite knowing about vital effects for >70 years, progress to overcome them has been frustratingly slow because the composition of the fluid used for skeleton construction is unknown.

UNLOCK will go beyond the state-of-the-art by developing a novel cryo-analytical toolkit to directly measure the chemical and isotopic composition of the calcifying fluid for the first time. This will be integrated with other innovative techniques to address four core objectives: 1) determine how environment influences the composition of the calcifying fluid and hence skeleton; 2.) identify the role of metastable phases and precipitation rate in controlling proxy sensitivity; 3.) quantify how skeletal construction processes shape spatial heterogeneity and the recording of environmental signals; and 4.) develop numerical models of coral vital effects to underpin the next-generation of palaeoclimate reconstructions and provide a robust frame-work for using skeletal geochemistry to quantify the environmental sensitivity of coral physiology.

By UNLOCKing the chemistry of the calcifying fluid, we will transform our understanding of vital effects to deliver unprecedented accuracy in palaeoclimate reconstructions on centennial to millennial timescales and revealing how coral physiology responds to a rapidly changing ocean.