Helena Filipsson

Human-induced impacts are increasing pressure on coastal ecosystems, particularly on benthic ecosystems in high-latitude regions. It has become evident that three of the greatest marine environmental challenges related to anthropogenic activity are warming, ocean acidification, and deoxygenation. The effect of these environmental changes on our uncertain future has created a need to understand their severity and potential outcomes, and geological records can provide a much-needed perspective of environmental processes extending beyond the instrumental period. Within palaeoceanography, marine microfossil species distribution and geochemistry have long been used as proxies for reconstructing environmental changes. Here, we explore an alternative avenue by using calcareous foraminiferal shell morphology (e.g., shell volume, shell thickness, pore density) to study past coastal environments. We have performed tomographic X-ray microcomputation analyses on foraminifera for three-dimensional (3D) shell reconstruction from different sites and periods (e.g., the last 200 years, and the last deglaciation from ~18 to ~11 ka BP into the Holocene) in the Baltic Sea region. These data are combined with conventional faunal analyses of the foraminiferal fauna. We will discuss the advantages, challenges, and future prospects of micro-computed tomography and 3D imaging, how the field has developed over time, and how to manage massive data in the environmental sciences.