The Mediterranean Sea currently hosts multiple “cold water carbonate” environments facing increasing stress from environmental change. This project is aimed at understanding how an important subset of these environments, those dominated by coralline algae, have responded to environmental change in the past and how are they responding to them now.
Few are the places outside the Mediterranean realm where coralline algae are as abundant and diverse across time and space. Malta is a unique locality where expansive accumulations of coralline algae are known from the Oligocene to Modern. Their ability to retain environmental information in different ways makes coralline algae accumulations extremely useful to understand both Earth’s future and past. When they exist in one locality across multiple dramatic shifts, such as in Malta, they can be used as a means of looking in detail at changes in environmental parameters across time. Malta resides in a special location in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea, where it can trace environmental changes in the surface waters of the Mediterranean as well as major climate changes, such as modifications to the inter tropical convergence zone. In Malta, coralline algae deposits exist in three episodes of significant changes to the world’s, and the Mediterranean’s, climate and oceans: the global cooling of the Late Oligocene, followed by the warming of the Early Miocene, the rapidly changing climate and oceanic connectivity of the Late Miocene, leading to the initial stages of the Messinian salinity crisis and in present times - anthropogenic forcing. For all three stages, our understanding of the south-central Mediterranean is limited.