Coral reefs preserve an excellent record of the past communities that helped to form their relief.
As a result, it was generally thought that modern or Holocene Western Atlantic reefs were limited to thin veneers with inherited relief and were less than 5000 years old. The Holocene history of coral reefs is one of desperately trying to cope with the rising seas caused by the melting of Pleistocene ice sheets. We refer to this period of rising seas as the Holocene Transgression. In fact, reefs did not survive, but corals did, to once again start constructing reefs. This schematic shows how a group of joggers can illustrate the response of coral reefs to rising sea levels.