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UNC researchers Karl Castillo and Justin Ries used a large pneumatic drill to extract 13 core samples from massive starlet corals on the reef and measured the thickness of their annual growth bands in order to estimate trends in their growth rates over the last 100 years. They found a decline in skeletal growth in corals closest to the open ocean, while growth in corals from the other two reef zones — the nearshore (located closest to the shore) and the backreef (located directly behind the reef crest) — remained relatively unchanged. Study Link: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1577.html