A History of the "Coral Reef Problem," from Explorations to Explosions
Intellectual Merit The objective of this project is to produce a history of what became known as the "coral reef problem," from European naturalists' first explorations in the Pacific to the mid-twentieth century, when new types of coral research were made possible through the aftermath of the U.S. nuclear weapons testing programs at the coral atolls of the Marshall Islands. This question consumed participants ranging from naval policymakers to science administrators, and it was taken up by a diverse but mutually recognized group of naturalists and scientists from a variety of distinct backgrounds and disciplines. What united them was a common discourse on the formation of coral reefs, but what divided them promises to offer insights into the practice of studying nature and the ways of formulating theories as they changed over this time. Scientists have used coral reefs as a place to juxtapose kingdoms of nature, the present and the past, and conceptions of the individual and the community. Reefs have constituted a point of intersection for many of the classic notions of how the study of nature should be divided: they are at once animal, vegetable, and mineral. The "life" of a single reef unites the present and the ancient past. They are renowned as complex ecosystems, but students of their growth and shapes have treated them as organic individuals. For these reasons, the coral reef problem at issue in this dissertation has been of sustained intellectual significance to scientists over the past two hundred years. The project will be a history of the ideas those scientists produced. And when science has commanded the attention of politics and the fascination of society-as over evolution and the Bomb-coral reefs have been the experimental and explosive proving ground for some of science and culture's deepest reaching questions.
Broader Impacts This project will be of interest, then, to anyone who hopes to understand how science has brought coral reefs from the periphery of our understanding to the center of our conceptions of what is most complex, fragile, and valuable about nature. It will also be of substantial relevance to historians, philosophers, and science teachers interested in the way that scientific problems have been asked, answered, challenged, and tested during the development of modern professional science. This project shows how members of very different scientific disciplines-natural historians, geologists, zoologists, ecologists, and physical geographers- set about attacking the exact same question: how are coral reefs formed?
