"Unprecedented" Collapse Of Great Barrier Reef; Half Of Northern Reef's Coral Already Gone
A steep decline in coral cover right across the Great Barrier Reef is a phenomenon that “has not been observed in the historical record”, a new report by the Australian Institute of Marine Science says.
The institute, Australia’s government-backed marine research agency, periodically releases results of a long-term reef monitoring program. Each reef along the Queensland coast is visited by researchers every two years to assess its condition and coral cover.
The latest results, released on Tuesday, detail how major bleaching events in 2016 and 2017 have impacted on different sections of the reef. AIMS said it had no previous record of bleaching events occurring in successive years. “Over the 30-plus years of monitoring by AIMS, Great Barrier Reef reefs have shown their ability to recover after disturbances, but such ‘resilience’ clearly has limits,” the report says.
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Survey reefs in the northern section, the worst hit by climate-induced marine heatwaves, have lost about half their coral cover. The impacts of the most recent heatwave is not fully represented in the results, as the most recent AIMS surveys have been in the central and southern sections. The central section “sustained significant coral loss due to coral bleaching and the continued southwards spread of the current wave of crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks”. Total coral cover decreased from 22% in 2016 to 14% in 2018.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/05/coral-decline-in-great-barrier-reef-unprecedented
