It’s official: the Great Barrier Reef is being battered by yet another major coral bleaching event. This is the fifth such event in just eight years, marking a horrendous blow for the much-loved and much-troubled reef.
The ongoing bleaching event was confirmed on March 8 by the
The grim confirmation comes after helicopter flights over the southern Great Barrer Reef documented extensive coral bleaching in late February. The aerial surveys gathered dated on over 300 inshore, mid-shelf, and offshore reefs, in the Great Barrier Reef’s southern and central regions.
“When bleaching becomes common across many sectors of the Great Barrier Reef, including both inshore and offshore reefs, it becomes a mass bleaching event,” Dr Neal Cantin, a AIMS Senior Research Scientist who led the aerial surveys, explained in a
“As the Great Barrier Reef ecosystem is so large, the size of Italy, the heat stress across it isn’t uniform. As a result, we are seeing differences between reefs with respect to the number of corals that are completely white. This pattern largely follows the pattern of accumulated heat stress seen over the past few months,” continued Cantin.
Mass
They occur
Without their algae comrades, the coral lose a major source of food, making them weak and susceptible to disease. The algae are also what gives the coral their bright colors, so their absence leaves them looking pale and white, hence the term “bleaching”.
Given its
“In the last northern hemisphere summer there was record breaking heat stress in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific, causing severe and widespread coral bleaching. This mass coral bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef is part of a global pattern of extreme heat, caused by climate change,” explained AIMS Research Program Director Dr David Wachenfeld.
In a
However, environmental groups have accused the government of being hypocritical, claiming they are pretending to protect the reefs while simultaneously bolstering the fossil fuel industry.
“Claims that Australia is taking the health of the
“Relentless pollution from coal, oil and gas is Australia’s number one environmental problem and it’s literally cooking the Reef. Our environmental protection laws are outdated and in desperate need of an overhaul to prevent new reef-destroying gas and coal projects,”