Engineers Use 3D Printing to Speed Up Coral Reef Recovery

As climate change and other factors jeopardize the world’s coral reefs — and the astonishing volume of ocean life they support — scientists are racing to come up with solutions. Reefs are built over many years — from decades to millennia, in some cases — as coral gradually deposit their carbonate skeletons. Reversing and restoring damaged reefs, therefore, is a painstaking process. To date, those efforts have involved installing support structures for coral made from concrete blocks, metal frames, or even 3D-printed structures made of synthetic materials. But when reefs are constructed at a rate of just millimeters per year, any sort of head-start can help. Bioengineers from the King Abdullah University of Science & Technology in Saudi Arabia detailed a novel 3D printing process that could do just that.