After years of heated debate there is finally definitive proof that Charles Darwin was wrong. It's not his most famous theory of evolution that has been proven wrong, that still holds up, but instead his theory as to how coral grows has been debunked.
While to the naked eye coral looks like an inanimate object, it is actually a living organism. Becky Oskin, a writer for the blog OurAmazingPlanet describes Darwin's theory as to how coral grows.
"After seeing a reef encircling Moorea, near Tahiti, Darwin came up with his theory that coral atolls grow as reefs stretch toward sunlight while ocean islands slowly sink beneath the sea surface. (Cooling ocean crust, combined with the weight of massive islands, causes the islands to sink.)"
This theory was fought vigorously by scientists from the day Darwin introduced it in 1842. Many scientists thought that coral was always in a very thin layer, not thousands of feet thick like Darwin proposed. Darwin was proven correct about the thickness of coral in 1953, according to OurAmazingPlanet.
A new study in the May 9 issue of Geology has shed new light on how coral reefs grow and proven that they are actually more complex than Darwin had guessed. While the island's steady sink to back into the ocean does have something to do with coral's growth the new study finds that the rising and falling sea level from glacial cycles is the main contributing factor.
"Darwin actually got it mostly right, which is pretty amazing," said Taylor Perron, the study's co-author. "He didn't know about these glacially induced sea-level cycles."
Scientists in this study were able to combine their knowledge of glacially induced sea-level cycles with the factors Darwin thought contributed to coral growth and come up with a much more detailed theory.
"You can explain a lot of the variety you see just be combining these various processes- the sinking of islands, the growth of reefs, and the last few million years of sea-level going up and down rather dramatically," Perron said.
The researchers found that there was one location where the combination of a sinking island and sea level rise creates perfect atolls, the Society Islands, which is where Darwin came up with his theory, according to OurAmazingPlanet.
