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• Researchers believe that they may have found what caused the death of the large and colorful reefs about 100 miles from the Galveston coast 30 years ago.

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Considered some of the healthiest coral reefs remaining in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, the large and colorful reefs at the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary grow on top of shallow, submerged banks in otherwise deep water.

As reported in Coral Reefs, researchers found that two separate processes caused hypoxia on the reef, leading to the die-off: the transport of freshwater runoff from the Mississippi, Atchafalaya, and Brazos Rivers, and an upwelling of deep, dense water onto the reef.

“We believe the combination of two different processes—river runoff and upwelling—caused localized hypoxia that killed invertebrates on the reef,” says Katie Shamberger, a researcher in the oceanography department at Texas A&M University. “In other words, both processes happened simultaneously to cause hypoxia and one of them alone may not have caused any trouble.”

The first process, river runoff that flowed offshore, was most likely water from the Mississippi-Atchafalaya Rivers, but about one-fifth of the water was from Texas rivers, Shamberger says.

These waters made it out to the Flower Garden Banks as a thin, low salinity surface layer. Since it was on the surface, the low salinity water probably didn’t touch the Flower Garden Banks reefs, which are about 60 feet deep, but the runoff was turbid and blocked sunlight from the reef.

Read the full article about the Texas coral reef by Keith Randall at Futurity.