We’ve seen story after harrowing story about widespread coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to bring you a new one this morning: parts of the reef will never fully recover from the bleaching events.
The repeated bleaching, caused by spikes in water temperature, does not give coral enough time to recover in between bleaching events, according to an article published today in scientific journal Nature. “Globally these events have become the new normal, and the time between them is getting shorter and shorter,” said Dr Terry Hughes of James Cook University, the paper’s lead author.
The paper argues that a new bleaching event is occurring, after last year’s event was confirmed to be the worst on record. That event also affected reefs in places like Japan and the Caribbean.
As the timeframe between bleaching events narrows, larger coral does not have the time to recover. Hughes says this means that smaller, weedier coral tends to replace the larger formations everyone knows and loves.
“As these events become more frequent, and more severe as temperatures keep going up, there’s less and less time between them for anything like a full recovery.”
Predictably, climate change has been fingered as the culprit here. Though federal and state governments have attempted to rehabilitate the reef through a number of local initiatives like halting agricultural runoff into the waters, Hughes says these efforts aren’t really amounting to much, pointing to bleaching occurring in waters unaffected by pollution.
“Near shore, turbid reefs that are quite muddy had the same loss of corals, the same level of bleaching as offshore reefs in crystal clear water.”
Dr Hughes and his colleagues point to immediate efforts to curb climate change as the only way to halt mass coral bleaching at the reef. “I don’t think people are aware just how bad it is,” he said.
Source: ABC.
Photo: Getty / Auscape.
