Researchers at Rice University’s Earth, Environment and Planetary Sciences department traveled 50 miles offshore Corpus Christi to document a particularly strange shape occurring in dead coral reef. In the ten reefs they imaged, each had a stairstep morphology, a shape which led them to discover that sea level rise at the end of the last period of glaciation was not steady, but punctuated, rising at different rates over time. The discovery contributes to helping them to better model and understand future sea-level rise scenarios.