Article body copy
Decommissioned ships, concrete waste, military tanks, sculptures, and even cremated human remains mixed with cement have all been purposefully sunk over the years to form artificial coral reefs. Other human-made structures have, sometimes inadvertently, contributed too, such as oil rigs, jetties, and sea walls. Given time, life has colonized the cracks and crevices, often producing diverse and abundant ecosystems. However, as new research suggests, when it comes to artificial coral reefs, these stand-ins are no replacement for the real thing.
This realization came to Claudia Hill, a graduate student at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, after she and her colleagues surveyed the coral diversity of a 200-year-old artificial reef that lies beneath the tropical coastal waters of Sint Eustatius, in the eastern Caribbean. The reef comprises stone ruins of an 18th-century jetty and 19th-century breakwater that, by 1834, had been washed into the sea by hurric
Netherlands
Groningen
Singapore
Claudia-hill
University-of-singapore
University-of-groningen
Sint-eustatius
நெதர்லாந்து
க்ராநிகந்
சிங்கப்பூர்
கிளாடியா-மலை
பல்கலைக்கழகம்-ஆஃப்-சிங்கப்பூர்