Marine calcifiers play a fundamental role in ocean ecosystems and the global carbon cycle by producing and exporting calcium carbonate (CaCO₃). Pelagic calcifiers, chiefly coccolithophores, foraminifers and pteropods account for a major fraction of pelagic CaCO₃ production, but benthic calcifiers such as foraminifers and coralline red algae are also important ecologically and are used as proxy archives. Understanding their future under climate change requires connecting processes operating at the level of biomineralization with organismal physiology, ecology, biogeochemical cycling and ecosystem change.
This session will bring together experimental, field-based, geochemical, modelling and palaeoceanographic approaches to investigate how environmental change affects marine calcification and the fate of calcifiers. We particularly invite contributions addressing the mechanisms underlying biomineralization, including ion transport, carbonate chemistry, elemental and isotopic fractionation, and the controls on calcification and dissolution. We also welcome studies examining how physiological responses translate into changes in growth, reproduction, species distributions, community structure and ecosystem functioning and how these responses shape the vulnerability and resilience of marine calcifiers to ocean change.
A central goal is to bridge traditionally separated perspectives: controlled laboratory experiments that identify the mechanisms governing calcification; observations and experiments across natural environmental gradients that reveal organismal responses in situ; and biogeochemical and Earth-system models that translate these processes into consequences for the marine carbonate cycle.
We encourage contributions from research on all major pelagic and benthic calcifiers as well as comparative studies across taxa, life stages and environments. Studies using modern observations, experiments, sedimentary archives, geochemical proxies and modelling are particularly welcome. By bringing these approaches together, the session aims to advance a mechanistic understanding of how marine calcification responds to environmental change and how these responses may propagate from individual organisms to ecosystems and the global carbon cycle.