"He published a beautiful map that compiled all the known reefs on Earth," Droxler said. The Beagle, like every Royal Navy vessel, carried charts with the marked location of every known reef, and Darwin put these to use in his 1842 paper. "So they needed to know exactly where they were located." "They come out of the abyssal plain of the ocean to almost no depth," Droxler said. Some were topped with low-lying islands but many were jagged rings of coral-topped rock that sat just below the water's surface, ready to rip the bottom out of unwary passing ships. Atolls were particularly interesting and dangerous. "They spent a lot of time mapping reefs because they were such hazards to shipping," Droxler said of the Royal Navy. The ship's primary mission was surveying coastlines and hazards to navigation, and the ship's orders included collecting detailed observations of the tides and ocean depths around a coral atoll. A geologist by training, Darwin was keenly interested in the rocks and landforms he encountered in his five years aboard the Beagle. Published this month in the Annual Review of Marine Science, the paper was co-authored by Droxler and longtime collaborator Stéphan Jorry, a marine geologist and oceanographer at the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea (IFREMER).ĭarwin's theory about the formation of atolls was published in 1842, six years after his legendary voyage aboard the British survey ship HMS Beagle.
If they teach one thing about reefs or carbonates in marine science 101, they teach that model."ĭroxler, a professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Rice for 33 years, is hoping to set the record straight with a 37-page, tour de force paper about the origins of atolls. "Every introductory book you can find in Earth science and marine science still has Darwin's model. "It's so beautiful, so simple and pleasing that everybody still teaches it," said Droxler, who recently retired from Rice University.
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