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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.
won't change a thing though.
Gets greedy. Blows own foot off.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/06/australia-must-choose-between-coal-and-coral-the-great-barrier-reef-depends-on-it
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-21/great-barrier-reef-pitched-against-coal-jobs-in-australia-vote
Easy to calculate Coral half-life.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
So much for the asshats who say the seas are not warming. 2 degrees sustained difference is enough to kill coral and other sea life.
Digressing, if I were a richer man, I would have already moved to Australia, but not to Queensland near the GBR, rather Adelaide or environs in South Australia, my favorite part of the country. The Aussies have such good music, lifestyles, and food/drink. Maybe one day...
Captcha: possible
from power boat motor engine.??????????????
Evolution
Given the "ups and downs" of long term cyclical temperature shifts 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.
I hate mixing seeing political agendas thrown in with science.
See subject: Your MASSIVE FAIL in this life is you're nothing more than a chattering little do-nothing "ne'er-do-well" online & you know it...
* Is that the best your "phantasyland FAKE NAME" (for your fake lie of a so-called 'life') can manage?
When a FAKE NAME do nothing like YOU does better than I have? Then talk (you're all talk & no action)...
You can't help you're an immature little BUTTHURT no-mind, lol! I blew you away in TONS OF PLACES and easily dust your no-mind bullshit blatherings.
APK
P.S.=> The TRUE PRICE of your UNIDENTIFIABLE FAKE NAME do-nothing selves like you that I can ALWAYS CASH IN ON (lol) is that I can use FACT/TRUTH on them to SHATTER their all TOO fragile delusional egos that they actually know A DAMN THING in computing, lol... apk
That the Coral reef has been recovering. (look it up)
So which news source do you believe.
Answer: The one that backs up the bias you believe to suit any agenda you'll stand with.
Well, since all the news we ever receive on the environment is bad, it sure seems to me that we never do anything right. If the news ever reported that things were getting better, there wouldn't be a persistent sense of crisis and environmental NGOs would lose that most precious resource: money. People would lose their jobs. They have a conflict of interest in generating as much "the sky is falling" rhetoric as possible. This is very harmful. It feeds pessimism in Western countries and you get a lot of people firmly convinced that instead of being the best culture to ever live, we are the worst culture to ever live.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Okay.
CAN anything REALISTICALLY be done in a time-frame that would help save ANY of the remainder?
Because if something CAN, all the whingeing and bitching is wasting time.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I know very little about coral and my partner has a marine tank to which the stuff is a pain to keep alive. The stuff ebbs and weaves so drastically that any small unnoticeable change is catastrophic, or excellent. It 'appears' greatly difficult to predict. And this is in a well contained 'balanced' tank.
The ocean is a vast greatness of change. Surely these critters can bounce back under perfect conditions, but the conditions they are under must be so drastic as to be a miracle anything grows there at all imo.
Broken sea shells and corals make up most of the beach sand you walk on along coast lines between your toes. They all come from reefs of the entire world. Where one habitat goes another appears.
People give evolution zero credit when talking about global warming. Life can and does evolve to the most harshest of conditions known to mankind. I doubt the reef will completely die out before something else moves in to take over. Time will tell. We surely can't.
We could stop making it worse if we mandated that in a massive solar/wind/nuclear/tidal effort. But that would make Trump supporters feel uncomfortable and useless.
You could argue some of the big Hurricanes last year were caused by global warming but you couldn't prove it. This may go down in history as the first $multi-billion casualty directly tied to global warming. No way it can recover before the next bleaching decimates it further.
My problem is that NVIDIA GPUs are so friggin expensive. Some rocks in the ocean? Not my worry. How about a story about the GPU shortage, you know, something that affects me.
> That's assuming that it's an exponential and not either a power function or just an extremely fast, but semi-random, rate of decay.
It's not an exponential rate, a power rate, or a fast rate. It's not any kind of rate. It's an event that happened in 2017. A current came through. It happens.
The summary included a nod to that truth while the headline "since 2016" tried to puff it up as a global warming thing.
If the deniers weren't so stupid and easily led by FUD, something would have been done about it.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Would this be implemented before it's ALL DEAD?
Probably not.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Fuck climate denial.
What can be done ABOUT THE REEF IN PARTICULAR?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Maybe, we don't know, and there are other reefs and ecosystems to save, einstein-san
YurPtBejing?
Glad I went snorkeling on the reef 9 years ago.
It was a special experience.
So sad, too bad if you didn't see the reef in all it's glory.
Man is really good at making lots of living things dead.
Go well
https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/what-in-the-world-are-they-spraying/
Aluminum from c-h-e-m-t-r-a-i-l-s ?
I'm sure once Earth's human population reaches 10 or 15 billion, all these environmental problems we keep hearing about will be easy to solve. The more people there are, the more brains there are to work on the problem, right? Because intelligence is evenly distributed among all peoples. So once there are 20 billion people on the planet there'll be plenty of smart people around to save the Great Barrier Reef.
A great wall. And make someone else, I don't know who, pay for it.
CAN anything REALISTICALLY be done in a time-frame that would help save ANY of the remainder?
Slashdot does not exist to provide solutions, but to criticize the proposed ones. You must be new here.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Stupid conspiracy theorists
to know this is a big deal? Or are you guys all just shooting off your mouth. Sure the author is making noise but its their paper. Thats what every author does. For all we know 40% of coral might die off on average. Coral organisms themselves aren't that long lived.
Coral reefs contribute nothing to the world. There is no scientific evidence to show they are beneficial in any way.
Captcha: frauds
The data I really want to see is how often this happens. Then, how quickly will it grow back?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
...that it's close to pining for the fjords?
CAN anything REALISTICALLY be done in a time-frame that would help save ANY of the remainder?
There is more at stake than just the coral of the Great Barrier Reef. This is just the foreword of the many extinctions that are to come. There are MANY things we must do to veer off this catastrophic path, the first of which is informing people of what is actually happening. An informed public can elect leaders to change the law so that we actually improve the situation instead of sitting around and claiming everything is fine.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The fact that you're saying "what about now" is precisely what's wrong with climate change denial. Things don't happen immediately, and those kind of things don't have immediate fixes.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Stfu man
Yes. First, we stop digging.
The problem is that the leaders of the worst offending countries don't really give a fuck or are actively trying to make things worse. A surprising number of world leaders seem to be self-absorbed nihilists.
You are welcome on my lawn.
There's only one way to find out. But we know for sure it's not going to get better the way we're going.
You are welcome on my lawn.
People have already identified coral species that like the warmer water. Just transplant them there. What could possibly go wrong?
Fixing a reef isn't an easy task. Fixing a reef 344,400 square kilometres in size is quite another.
The principle problem is that increased CO2 in the atmosphere is basically acidifying the ocean, so to remove the cause of the damage would require some pretty serious geo-engineering. It's practically teraforming.
There are stopgap measures, involving growing coral in nurseries and transplanting them back over the bleached and dead corals (Just glue those puppies back in. Seriously), but due to the sheer scale of the task this might only be practical in some key tourist areas.
More long term solutions might involve generating GMO corals with better resilience against acidification, and higher temperature variation tolerances, because its probably going to take a very long time for the oceans Ph to return to acceptable levels (Im not sure on this point, but it seems fairly straigthforward that without physically adding in billions of tonnes of Ph buffers one must assume the natural mechanisms would be slow, as nature is want to be).
But if we're honest, not a lot other than trying to stop the bleeding at the source and quit pumping shit into the atmosphere and oceans,
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Combined with how long before it sees such a current again. 100 years to grow back if fine if it's a 250 year event. Not if it's a 25 year event.
I have one objection. This sounds really bad, like several other things we've done to the environment, a few of those a result of the global climate change that we have caused.
However, they are researching the death of the corals, so they should stop at finding the cause as a result of their research - i.e. warming of water. As they are not researching climate change, they should not go further back to the cause of the warmer waters - in fact, while climate change could easily cause the warming of waters, they don't have the data to prove that specific event was caused by it (as it was not the focus of their research), in effect giving ammunition to the climate change deniers who can point to research like this and say it is all "political".
i thought we killed it already....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADGs_vH4w20
What about the crown of thorns starfish, and what about runoff of from farming, are micro plastics contributing? All we ever hear is climate change is responsible.
There are a number of things we can be doing to make a huge difference, but instead we are heavily focused on a depleted gas. I'm sorry people but it smells like a scam to generate more tax income. Check your facts on CO2, it's actually used in green houses to improve plant growth, so it's hardly a pollutant. We're expected to believe possibly incorrect assumptions in computer driven climate models and are told that cutting greenhouse gasses, paying higher electricity bills and killing off our economy is supposed to save it?
The computer models have a very poor record of actually predicting anything useful at all.
We are forced to keep old Coal power stations limping along, that are only 37% efficient, when we should be building new co-generation super critical power stations that approach 50% thermal efficiency. Now that would cut pollution more than all the renewable's combined, we'd have cheap power and it would stop companies moving off shore to country's with lower environmental standards.
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.
Nothing can be done you fucking retard.
The ocean has been steadily getting warmer (just as climate scientists have been saying) for decades.
We can't just magically drop the temperature whenever we want.
That's why people have been saying we need to reduce CO2 now if we want to prevent catastrophe in 50 years.
The reef is done for.
Congratulations on completely missing my point.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
http://www.pbs.org/video/decod...
They mentioned since the 1970s, half the coral over the whole planet has been destroyed. Fucking not cool. One possible hope is that this lady with her team in Hawaii are trying to "speed up evolution" and introduce hardy coral types all over the world. 25% of sea life is around coral reefs... if we lose all of them I'm pretty sure it's going to cause a lot of problems.
I'll say that 15 years ago I was skeptical about the global warming thing. Then as more and more scientists became more sure, I realized there was absolutely something to it. This episode of Nova shows you tons and tons of evidence of why the majority of scientists seem to have no doubt. The worst thing is that we are now at atmospheric CO2 concentrations that are about double what the highest has ever been in the last 800,000 years as measured by air trapped in 2 mile deep ice in the arctic (or was it antarctic?). CO2 going up so violently quickly and heating going up so violently quickly is the real problem... we don't have a 10,000 years to adapt, we have a decade. Anything without a quick reproduction cycle is going to struggle in some areas. Don't worry, insects don't have this problem so you can bet no matter what we do there will be bugs left to eat our rotting corpses.
They say it has been estimated how much extra carbon we have put in the atmosphere from fossil fuels, and of that about 25% is absorbed by the ocean and another 25% is absorbed by trees on land. The other 50% is good old greenhouse gassing it up. The majority of the heat is absorbed by oceans too, which for now is keeping the atmosphere from changing as rapidly. Only problem is they predict by the year 2100 we'll have anywhere from 1 to 8 feet of higher ocean levels, which will screw up a lot of places along the coasts.
The only good news I got from this show was that wind and solar is cheaper than what anybody thought possible at this point in time, and usually cheaper than creating new coal operations. So at least the greedy types won't have more excuses to screw us over even more.
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.”"
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
"What caused the devastation? Hughes was clear: human-caused global warming."
The Great Barrier Reef is NOT dying cause of global warming. In fact, many of the issues attributed to global warming are NOT due to global warming (Case in point, Redwood trees are not being burned up cause of global warming as touted. They are burning, because we have allowed other trees usually destroyed by seasonal fires to grow to maturity. Redwood bark is so thick it is nearly fireproof. Redwood branches are so high up, flames usually cannot reach them. However, allowing oaks and other lesser trees to reach maturity, has also allowed those flames to jump from the lesser tree branches to the higher branches of the redwoods, resulting in the death of many age old trees which had survived numerous prior forest fires.)
See this is the #1 problem with Global Warming. EVERY environmental issue is blamed on Global Warming, and issues that were commonly discussed in the 90's are now ignored. Global Warming basically absconded environmentalism.
Do your research on the barrier reefs. You'll find there are scientists who have tested the reefs, and what they have discovered is extremely high levels of pesticides and herbicides from Australian agricultural runoff. This is the main culprit. These toxins build up and disrupt the balanced relationship of coral. They also weak its immune system, which has made the coral susceptible to a herpes-type virus.
THIS IS THE REAL CAUSE...and as long as you are STUPID enough to allow every environmental issue to be blamed on "global warming" than you are going to doom the planet by allowing the actual causes of these problems to go unheeded. Many of which are due to big industries, and love that global warming is getting the blame for all their pollution.
When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It.
If you care about this take care of the working class & poor. Once they're secure in their food, shelter, healthcare, education and transportation (e.g. the basics of life) then you can talk to them about global warming.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Before Global Warming was blamed for it, the Crown of Thorns starfish was identified as the culprit. It's not clear to me why temperature is now the cause with no mention of the starfish.
According to research by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, coral cover on surveyed reefs between 1985 and 2012 declined by about 50 per cent over that 27 year period. Crown-of-thorns starfish were responsible for almost half of this decline.
Research estimates that if crown-of-thorns starfish predation had not occurred over the past three decades, there would have been a net increase in average coral cover.
None of which has anything to do with the price of tea in China.
If the temperatures hadn't changed at all....
THIS WOULD STILL BE HAPPENING. THIS IS DUE TO AGRICULTURAL RUNOFF.
Coral = marine invertebrates, that have a symbiotic relationship with dinoflaggellates (microscopic algae).
So basically, agricultural runoff contains pesticides - toxins designed to kill small microbes, plant, fungus, arthropods, invertebrates, etc.
Hmm...any wonder the coral reefs are dying.
Some corals die other corals grow. This is not our mandate to stop evolution from working.
Those worst offending countries aren't on this list since these countries are already cutting CO2. The worst offending countries were exempted from any action as they quickly and happily agreed in the Paris accords...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
They're simply evolving in response to the changing environment. Besides, who doesn't like a nice bleached white piece of coral on their bookshelf? /s
Perhaps it should now be downgraded to "The Good Barrier Reef". Eventually it will inevitably become the "The Fair Barrier Reef" and ultimately "The Poor Barrier Reef".
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
We can grow corals in captivity and sequence their genome.
That would make a repopulation effort after the underlying issue is resolved feasible, and may open the possibility of engineering corals that can survive the new environmental conditions.
However that won't prevent the next mass extinction caused by the same underlying problem, nor will it prevent the second order effects on the ecosystem of the loss of an entire ecological niche, or the non-coral related problems that affect humans with the same root cause (rising sea levels, shifts in arable regions, more sevear hurricanes, etc.)
For that reason it's still better to cut CO2 emissions than to just throw up our hands and call it "too late". As that has some chance of preventing the next incident and reducing the other related problems that are not directly about coral.
1) IIRC, the GBR isn't this forever thing. In geologic terms, it's practically ephemeral at 20,000 years. It's not improbable that at some point, it will have lived it's span and then will succumb. We may witness this.
2) my understanding is that most of the bleaching of the reef *isn't* due to temperature change* but is in fact due to agri runoff and nitrogen blooms. In a test project where this was strongly suppressed, the reef bounced back significantly.
*let's remember that coral is one of the oldest multicellular life forms on the planet. It has survived/thrived in warmer times, and it has survived/thrived in cooler times. It has survived/thrived in times when the temperature changed MUCH more quickly than it is doing even today. To imply - as is so often the case - that this is somehow a signal marker for the widespread death of corals generally his histrionic FUD.
-Styopa
I'm just glad that Arthur C. Clarke is not around to see this.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
You're quite optimistic but I think you are missing the point. This is the beginning of the end, not a point in time at which any attempts at repair will be useful to the overall health of any of the world reefs. Once the Great Barrier Reef is gone you will see this in other parts of the globe and no amount of effort will be quick enough to slow or diminish the effects. Why does no one understand this? It's akin to a gigantic Tsunami wave, no matter how much you create barriers for protection it's simply too powerful to be stopped.
Agree with that. The reefs are home to thousands of species, so it's a daisy-chain ecologic collapse and perhaps (for some species) extinction. It's just ugly, and makes me ashamed of my species. As a species, we value our personal acruements, lifestyle, and our boorish consumption habits over the survival of nature and of (for that matter) any of the other species. It's built into the human genetic code, and because that species is so headstrong about its instinct for short-term gratification, it's also a self extincting trait.
Now, we can assume that the sharks have left as well and send Trump, Pence, W, and Cheney on down there for some R&R and have them swim in the great barrier reef. All safe and what not. Just have to give cheney a shotgun while they are out there.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
> The data I really want to see is how often this happens.
Every eight years or so. About half of El Niños see significant coral bleaching. The coral expels the zooxanthellae that live inside, so the coral doesn't have to provide for the zooxanthellae until the "weather" gets better. The natural white color of the coral is then visible. When conditions improve they let the zooxanthellae come back.
The coral can only survive so long without the zooxanthellae, maybe a year, so if the heat (or other adverse conditions) last several years, coral can die.