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Since 2016, Half of All Coral In the Great Barrier Reef Has Died (theatlantic.com)
A new paper, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, reports that the Great Barrier Reef has lost more than half of its corals since 2016. The authors inspected every one of its reefs, surveying them on an almost species-by-species basis, and found the damage to be widespread across the entire ecosystem. "Two of its most recognizable creatures -- the amber-colored staghorn corals, and the flat, fanlike tabular corals -- suffered the worst casualties," reports The Atlantic. From the report: "On average, across the Great Barrier Reef, one in three corals died in nine months," said Terry Hughes, an author of the paper and the director of the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, the Australian government's federal research program devoted to corals. "You could say [the ecosystem] has collapsed. You could say it has degraded. I wouldn't say that's wrong," Hughes said. "A more neutral way of putting it is that it has transformed into a completely new system that looks differently, and behaves differently, and functions differently, than how it was three years ago."
In the summer months of 2017, warm waters again struck the reef and triggered another bleaching event. This time, the heat hit the reef's middle third. Hughes and his team have not published a peer-reviewed paper on that event, but he shared early survey results with me. Combined, he said, the back-to-back bleaching events killed one in every two corals in the Great Barrier Reef. It is a fact almost beyond comprehension: In the summer of 2015, more than 2 billion corals lived in the Great Barrier Reef. Half of them are now dead. What caused the devastation? Hughes was clear: human-caused global warming. The accumulation of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere has raised the world's average temperature, making the oceans hotter and less hospitable to fragile tropical corals.
In the summer months of 2017, warm waters again struck the reef and triggered another bleaching event. This time, the heat hit the reef's middle third. Hughes and his team have not published a peer-reviewed paper on that event, but he shared early survey results with me. Combined, he said, the back-to-back bleaching events killed one in every two corals in the Great Barrier Reef. It is a fact almost beyond comprehension: In the summer of 2015, more than 2 billion corals lived in the Great Barrier Reef. Half of them are now dead. What caused the devastation? Hughes was clear: human-caused global warming. The accumulation of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere has raised the world's average temperature, making the oceans hotter and less hospitable to fragile tropical corals.
they only look at temperature. Why were there not any chemical samples taken? pollutant studies?
Pollutants are measured in areas where they are a concern, such as where mine tailings flow into the sea. But the GBR is 2300 km (1400 miles) long, and it is implausible that chemical waste or effluent could have so much effect across such a vast area.
ph level measurement?
Rising CO2 causes ocean ph to drop. This is happening worldwide. It is unlikely that falling ph (rising acidity) is the root problem, because acidity is rising everywhere and reefs are surviving and sometimes even expanding in places like Papahanaumokuakea in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, or the Sea of Japan, where temperatures are relatively cool.
Given the "ups and downs" of long term cyclical temperature shifts over the last 10-15,000 years, how can that conclusion be justified?
You just clarified that yourself. Because the changes we observe now happened within the course of a few years, not thousand years.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
It is of course true that some corals may do better in warmer water, especially in cooler waters. But even those need more than that.
More to the point, most corals grow in the locations & conditions that best suit them. When the conditions in those locations change rapidly and drastically, a lot of them will die off - as we are already now seeing. And given how slow coral reefs grow, it could take decades or centuries to recover even once conditions stabilise again.
Given the "ups and downs" ... over the last 10-15,000 years, how can that conclusion be justified? After all, during the last ice age there was no "Great Barrier Reef" as the sea-level was some 50 meters lower than now.
The Wikipedia article on corals would seem to differ on this point: "The Great Barrier Reef is thought to have been laid down about two million years ago."
Care to justify your conclusion?
I wouldn't get too focused on it being dead or not, we can do coral reintroduction, and the healthiest and most biodiverse reefs in the world sit just north of Australia in places like Indonesia, so if we can restore things to the point at which they can sustain reef life, there's a reasonable chance it can recover.
There's this kind of mystique around reefs when we see claims about how incredibly biodiverse they are, and how they're home to millions of unique species. That's true, but the diversity doesn't change drastically across large regions - sure different areas do have unique species, but the common species that build the reefs are continent wide, or even global.
I've recently participated in a coral conservation programme in the Caribbean helping to restore the exact same staghorn spoken about in the article. It's a species of coral that's struggling globally, but the good news is that it's also pretty damn easy to repopulate it, because you can just cut bits off, and grow them for a bit in ocean based nurseries, then just plant them with marine grade putty and similar things and within a few years they'll restore an area to it's natural state. The same is true of many corals.
As someone whose dived globally, one thing you start to realise is that for all those millions of species, there are certain ones you see time and time again - from Florida all the way down the chain of Caribbean islands to Curacao and all the way back up the mainland past Costa Rica, Yucatan and Mexico and back to Florida, you'll see the same species time and time again - the same fish, the same turtles, the same morays, the barracudas, the sharks, the puffers, the rays. Cozumel has it's distinct splendid toadfish, St Lucia has "the thing" and so on, but ultimately, it's clear that there are key species that prop up the reefs and sit widespread. If you go over to Asia the same applies, places like Lembeh like to tout their access to things like the Blue Ringed Octopus, and their nudibranchs and stuff, but you can see these all across tropical Asia - Thailand, the Philipines, Indonesia, Australia Some of those species are common all the way up through the Indian ocean into Egypt and Jordan's Red Sea reefs. Even in the colder regions, you see the same species along Norway's coastline as you do around the UK, and around Greenland and Iceland and to North America's northern coasts.
So even if we can't save say, the barrier reef in time to solve the warming problem, if we can at least keep some reefs going we can restore others to productivity. We will lose some localised distinctive species, which may mean we lose unique treatments for cancers and so forth, so it's not cost free for us as a species, but it needn't also be catastrophic for the oceans, because if we do lose the reefs, with lose the hatcheries and nurseries, and if we lose them, we lose 20%+ of the world's global food supply.
Ideally therefore, we want to limit the impact as fast as we can to protect food supplies, and to protect unique species that have led to groundbreaking medical research and other scientific advancement, but if we can't, there's still at least some hope. As with everything though - your backup plan should be just that, your backup plan, because if you don't even bother to try your primary plan, and fall straight through to the backup, then what happens if that fails? The harder we try for plan A - saving the reefs as they are, the easier and more likely it'll be we can succeed with plan B, if we absolutely end up having to fall back on it, so giving up because we might fail most definitely should not be an option we even begin to consider.
This news isn't exactly new.
There is a fantastic documentary Mission Blue about the ocean that discusses the coral dying back in 2014.
Other great documentaries include:
2. End of the Line
3. The Blue Planet: A Natural History of the Oceans
4. Sushi: the Global Catch
5. Turtle: The Incredible Journey
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Main St. built America
Wall St. destroyed it.
Here is a more informative source: https://www.theaustralian.com....
"Dr Reichelt said maps accompanying the research had been misleading, exaggerating the impact. “I don’t know whether it was a deliberate sleight of hand or lack of geographic knowledge but it certainly suits the purpose of the people who sent it out,” he said.
“This is a frightening enough story with the facts, you don’t need to dress them up. We don’t want to be seen as saying there is no problem out there but we do want people to understand there is a lot of the reef that is unscathed.”
Dr Reichelt said there had been widespread misinterpretation of how much of the reef had died.
“We’ve seen headlines stating that 93 per cent of the reef is practically dead,” he said.
“We’ve also seen reports that 35 per cent, or even 50 per cent, of the entire reef is now gone.
“However, based on our combined results so far, the overall mortality rate is 22 per cent — and about 85 per cent of that die-off has occurred in the far north between the tip of Cape York and just north of Lizard Island, 250km north of Cairns. Seventy-five per cent of the reef will come out in a few months time as recovered.”"
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The pattern of the environmental movement somehow continues to go unnoticed by the public: Environmentalists start paying attention to X, notice that their expectations for what X is like were wrong, then suggest that X is in danger from humans. But, in each case, the decision to announce a catastrophe can be shown to either be technically questionable, or simply premature.
Here's an example:
1979: First satellite measurements of ozone
1983: Ozone hole first detected
1985: Ozone hole declared a threat to the world
In terms of process, it is historically important to observe that the ozone hole was declared an emergency before a full solar cycle was observed with satellite.
Similar critiques have been made about these coral claims:
Similar arguments can be made about climate change arguments, because the Sun itself is still not well understood, and in particular, we do not even know what happens to the solar plasma which enters into the Earth's ionosphere. In fact, Piers Corbyn's successes at predicting long-range extreme weather events is highly suggestive that environmentalists have failed to understand certain crucial solar, plasma and magnetic parameters which may be externally altering climate parameters in ways that are difficult to untangle: