Almost a quarter of the coral on the Great Barrier Reef of Australia which is 1,400 miles long, with 2,900 individual reefs and 1,050 islands is now dead. The coral deaths followed intense coral bleaching, which was caused by global warming and influenced by the whims of the weather
Hot waters have caused corals worldwide to spit out the algae that provided their colour and food. Those that can’t cool down and find new algae quickly enough die.
The amount of pollution in the atmosphere continues to pile up and temperatures continue to rise worldwide. Bleaching is caused primarily by warm waters, and the current worldwide bleaching is the third and worst on record, all since the late 1990s.
More than of the corals surveyed in the central and northern sections of the Great Barrier Reef were reported this week to be dead or dying.
Experts question whether coral reefs can ultimately recover from such events, with climate models forecasting future warming. Experts say that those corals didn’t die slowly of starvation because they’d lost their symbionts; they actually cooked over a period of just a week or two because the temperatures in the northern Barrier Reef were so extreme.
