250 Miles Of Dead, Dying & Damaged Mangroves Mapped Along N. Australian Coast
A cascade of impacts including rising sea levels, heatwaves and back-to-back tropical cyclones has created 400 kilometers [249 miles] of dead and badly damaged mangroves in the Gulf of Carpentaria, a scientific monitoring trip has discovered. Prof Norman Duke, of James Cook University, spent 10 days monitoring 2,000km of coastline from a helicopter, as well as conducting land-based checks at 32 estuaries along the coastline between Weipa, Queensland, and Cape Barrow in the Northern Territory.
In 2015, the remote area suffered what is thought to be the worst mass dieback of mangroves ever recorded. The cause, Duke said, was a combination of extreme heat, a temporary drop in sea level at the time caused by atmospheric pressure, and drought. Duke and colleagues returned for a second follow-up monitoring trip to find devastating impacts of two cyclones had created a 400km stretch of dead and damaged mangroves.
In December 2018, Cyclone Owen battered the gulf’s coast and then, just three month’s later, the category 4 Cyclone Trevor struck just to the south of Owen’s impact area. “We are getting these compounding effects that we just didn’t expect,” Duke told Guardian Australia. “The mangroves hit in the 2015 dieback are already vulnerable because they are just recovering. Now you have all this dead wood that becomes like projectiles. It was a shock to me to see the damage.”
For hundreds of kilometres, Duke says what would usually be a landscape of lush green mangroves has been replaced by struggling dull grey trees with stripped foliage. “Mangrove forests are the only continuous forests in this area. These are very successful trees and they usually form a solid green canopy that’s very distinctive. Now we see canopy damage – a grey colour where it would normally be green.”
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https://desdemonadespair.net/2019/10/shocked-scientists-find-400-km-of-dead-and-damaged-mangroves-in-australias-gulf-of-carpentaria-we-are-getting-these-compounding-effects-that-we-just-didnt-expect.html
