Rapture, Rupture and Eruption

I'm sitting on the shore of Pemuteran Bay in Bali, where I've travelled to learn about Biorock: a life-support system for coral. A patented technology developed by an architect and a marine biologist in the 1980s, Biorock is a system of plastic, metal and electricity that provides coral with a more tolerable biophysical environment than the open ocean offers at the advent of the Anthropocene. Life buoys float in the waters of the bay, topped by solar-panel arrays that supply low-voltage current to metallic scaffolding underneath. Wires that extend from the underside of each buoy to the scaffold resting on the sea floor supply a kind of lifeline to coral, whose existence is propped up by the electrical current, which induces beneficial changes to the chemistry of the immediately surrounding water. Just as a life buoy is employed as an emergency measure for refugees lost at sea, the artificial reef forms a refugium for coral that can no longer survive out there 'in the wild'.