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'Huge Wake Up Call': Third of Central, Northern Great Barrier Reef Corals Dead (smh.com.au)
iONiUM quotes a report from The Sydney Morning Herald: More than one-third of the coral reefs of the central and northern regions of the Great Barrier Reef have died in the huge bleaching event earlier this year, Queensland researchers said. Corals to the north of Cairns -- covering about two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef -- were found to have an average mortality rate of 35 percent, rising to more than half in areas around Cooktown. Bleaching occurs when abnormal conditions, such as warm seas, cause corals to expel tiny photosynthetic algae, called zooxanthellae. Corals turn white without these algae and may die if the zooxanthellae do not recolonize them. "It is fair to say we were all caught by surprise," Professor Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, said. "It's a huge wake up call because we all thought that coral bleaching was something that happened in the Pacific or the Caribbean which are closer to the epicenter of El Nino events." The report says, "The northern end of the Great Barrier Reef was home to many 50- to 100-year-old corals that had died and may struggle to rebuild before future El Ninos push tolerance beyond thresholds."
Not sure if joke or you're ignorant of the fact that corals are actually animals and not rocks.
We're debating bathroom peen inspectors in red states as a top priority.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
UNESCO had drawn up a list of world heritage sites that were in danger from climate change, and Australia had the reefs removed because it would hurt tourism.
Between this and WHO saying there's no real risk to spreading zika so please go the the Olympics, it's obvious that it's all about the money.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
For a slightly more balanced view on this see here: https://judithcurry.com/2016/0...
One of the reasons that coral can adapt quickly is that their symbionts adapt quickly.
From the above reference "Although coral genomes may evolve slowly, their symbionts have extremely fast generation times, averaging every 7 days. Furthermore the symbiont community consists of hundreds of symbionts that have already adapted to a wide variety of temperature, irradiance and salinity variables within different microclimates over the past million years. Symbiont shuffling and shifting is an evolutionary masterpiece that circumvents plodding evolutionary mechanisms of most organisms with long generation times and enables immediate adaptation.
A good summary statement is provided by Baker et al. “flexibility in coral–algal symbiosis is likely to be a principal factor underlying the evolutionary success of these organisms”.
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Rushing off and blaming every adverse environmental outcome on climate change is in itself a religious belief system.
Which is why no-one listens to people like that.
But we do listen to actual scientists.
Apparently these symbionts didn't adapt quickly enough; much of the coral is dead.
However, it's not unheard of for reefs to recover faster than expected, if the water quality is good enough, so there's still some hope that any remaining symbionts will be more resilient in future. Unless they get hammered again too quickly...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?