A US Mag’s Devastating Obit For The Great Barrier Reef Has Gone Super Viral

Famous American outdoors magazine Outside has scored potentially its first ever story which might be construed as viral with a provocative obituary declaring our beloved Great Barrier Reef as very, very dead.

The reef was born on the eastern coast of the continent of Australia during the Miocene epoch. Its first 24.99 million years were seemingly happy ones, marked by overall growth. It was formed by corals, which are tiny anemone-like animals that secrete shell to form colonies of millions of individuals. Its complex, sheltered structure came to comprise the most important habit in the ocean. As sea levels rose and fell through the ages, the reef built itself into a vast labyrinth of shallow-water reefs and atolls extending 140 miles off the Australian coast and ending in an outer wall that plunged half a mile into the abyss. With such extraordinary diversity of life and landscape, it provided some of the most thrilling marine adventures on earth to humans who visited. Its otherworldly colors and patterns will be sorely missed.

The obit doesn’t hold back on condemning successive Australian governments for not giving a toss about the reef – referring to the Queensland government’s attempt to sell off the reef to mining companies back in the 60s, and the more recent attempts to dump mass volumes of coal silt onto the reef.