Past ocean temperatures and coupled U/Th and ^(14)C measurements from deep-sea corals

Deep-sea corals are a unique archive in paleoceanography. They have large banded skeletons that allow for high resolution records and have a high uranium content allowing for accurate calendar ages independent of radiocarbon age measurements. One problem with using deep-sea corals for long records is that it is difficult to date a large numbers of corals accurately and precisely. Unlike sediment cores, fossil fields of corals have no inherent stratigraphy and each individual coral must be separately dated.