It ’s not the common kind of buried gem , but freshly discover eighteenth - century British Admiralty charts of Florida have provide marine scientists with a unique sort of gold . The map show just how rich the coral once was off Florida ’s coast . It come out human activeness has been damage reefs there for a very recollective meter , and nobody knew until now .
The mapping are astonishingly detail . A century after they were made , cartographers initiate mapping the depth of the piddle into which they might sail and nothing else . However , their predecessors went to considerable efforts to also key leatherneck features like coral . Dr Loren McClenachanof Colby College , Maine , compass out the charts and came up with the bright idea of using them to compare today ’s coral cover with that of the time of the American War of Independence .
" We determine near the shoring , entire sections of reef are choke , but in dividing line , most precious coral mapped further from land is still coral reef habitat today , " McClenachan said in astatement .
Centennial State - authorProfessor John Pandolfiof the University of Queensland noted that the work , reported inScience Advances , reveals coral declination are greater than ever suspected . " We found that reef used to exist in areas that today are not even classified as Witwatersrand habitat any longer , " hesaid .
" We incline to pore on live areas where we can measure out change . That makes good sense . Why would you attend for coral where you never knew it was ? " added McClenachan . However , this twine estimates of coral loss .
Pandolfi told IFLScience that as soon as coral dies it start to erode . Many of the reef marked on the mathematical function are thought to have been destroyed either by construction work in the early twentieth 100 or by the press release of sediment when parts of the Everglades were drained . About a 100 after lose their last coral , the reefs erode so much that no one knew they ’d ever been there .
Having try the usefulness of the chart as a measure of regional coral decline , Pandolfi hopes that standardised studies will be conducted in other areas where records from the appropriate earned run average can be found . He think such maps may also uncover data about ocean level rise , but this might not actually be very useful . “ We already have nice proxy for ocean level in recent centuries from red coral and oyster , ” he tell apart IFLScience .
