Shifts in carbonate producers in deep time

Coral reefs are suffering as the planet warms up but this is not the hottest Earth has been! What did the reefs in the Coral Triangle look like in warmer times? Formation level analysis suggests they gradually shifted from forminiferal- to coral-dominance Earth got cooler but is that a real pattern or an effect of averaging millions of years into one data point? If we spent our whole lives analyzing thousands of thin sections to look on a bed-to-bed scale, what would we see?

That’s where George William Mallory Harrison IV comes in. Originally from the USA with a bachelor’s degree from College of Wooster and a Master in Geosciences from Friedrich Alexander Universität (and experience as a baker, park ranger, and post-worker), William will build an AI to analyze thin sections so that human scientists can see how reefs in the coral triangle changed through time at an extremely fine scale.