A living cold-water coral reef has been discovered by chance in the waters off southern Greenland.

The reef is located off Cape Desolation, or Cape Brill, a cape south of the city of Ivittuut in Greenland. It lies at a depth of about 900 m in a spot with very strong currents.

The discovery was made by accident by a team of marine scientists aboard a Canadian research vessel, called CCGS Henry Larsen, when a large fragment of a living coral colony was entangled in an oceanography instrument.

“It’s been known for many years that coral reefs have existed in Norway and Iceland and there is a lot of research on the Norwegian reefs, but not a great deal is known about Greenland,” said team member Ms Helle Jørgensbye, a PhD student from DTU Aqua, Denmark.

“In Norway, the reefs grow up to 30 m high and several kilometers long. The great Norwegian reefs are over 8,000 years old, which means that they probably started to grow after the ice disappeared after the last Ice Age.”

“The Greenlandic reef is probably smaller, and we still don’t know how old it is.”

The reef is formed by a species of cold-water coral called the eye-coral (Lophelia pertusa). It harbors plenty of different marine creatures including sponges, hydroids, polychaetes, crustaceans, bryozoans, and echinoderms.

According to the scientists, the discovery of a reef near Greenland was not entirely unexpected.

“There are coral reefs in the countries around Greenland and the effect of the Gulf Stream, which reaches the west coast, means that the sea temperature get up to about 4 degrees Celsius, which is warm enough for corals to thrive,” explained Ms Jørgensbye, who is a co-author of the article published in the journal ICES Insight.

“In addition to the comparatively warm temperature, a coral reef also needs strong currents. Both these conditions can be found in southern Greenland.”

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Tendal OS et al. 2013. Greenland’s first living deep-water coral reef. ICES Insight, no. 50, pp. 14-17