From Threat to Threatened: A Brief History of Coral Reef Research
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Alexander Dallas Bache was the second Superintendent of the U.S. Coast Survey. He was dedicated to charting our coastlines and improving the safety and effectiveness of marine navigation. In 1851, seeing coral reefs as a threat to the safety of ships traveling our coasts, he commissioned controversial American naturalist, Louis Agassiz, to study coral reefs in Florida for the U.S. Coast Survey to determine what could be done about this problem.

“(Can) the growth of coral reefs be prevented, or the results remedied, which are so unfavorable to the safety of navigation?” Bache asked Professor Louis Agassiz.

“I do not see the possibility of limiting in any way the extraordinary increase of corals, beyond the bounds which nature itself has assigned to their growth,” replied the professor in his report on the Florida reefs.
Charles Darwin was also doing research on coral reefs. He believed reefs were formed as volcanic islands subsided into the ocean and created the right conditions for them to grow. He theorized three stages of the coral reef: the fringing reef, the barrier reef, and the atolloffsite link.

Alexander Agassiz, son of Louis Agassiz, also worked for the U.S. Coast Survey. He followed Scottish marine scientist John Murray’s belief that elevated sedimentary platforms built up until they reached a point where enough sunlight went through the water for corals to live on themoffsite link. Alexander Agassiz wanted to disprove Darwin’s theory to avenge his father’s humiliation at Darwin’s hands, when they quarreled over creationism versus evolution. Louis Agassiz also supported the theory of polygenism, which has since been disproven.
Between 1896 and 1900, Alexander Agassiz collected many samples that he believed proved his theory on coral reef formation.
read more at noaa.gov.
