Coral   2 comments

This beach in the north-west of Scotland’s Isle of Skye is famous for being entirely composed from coral … except that it isn’t. The ‘coral’is mainly shell fragments and bleached remnants of red algae.

 

Posted November 30, 2008 by MRY in Geology, Skye

2 responses to Coral

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  1. Mark, can you do something to make it clear who is writing what in this blog…I just want to know quite how authoritative it is!

    jg

    Reply
    John
    December 1, 2008 at 11:46 am

  2. If you go rock-pooling and see a pink skin covering the stones you have seen a very close relative of this `coral`. Usually algae has to hold onto something hard but on rare occasions it can form indipendantly. This loose `coral` , coralline algae is known as MAERL. The white material you find(calcium carbonate ) is the main skeleton of the algae which has lost it`s live pink algae covering. For those that don`t manage to cross to Skye we found it at Arisaig.

    Reply
    Anonymous
    January 18, 2009 at 8:41 pm

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