Only 7 percent of the reef has escaped bleaching, according to researchers at the ARC Center of Excellence. Marshall, a professor at the University of Queensland, says the destructive phenomenon is happening in an area the size of Scotland.
"Before this mass bleaching started, we already were at the point of losing 50% of the coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef. This, I think, will probably take another 50% off what was left," Marshall says.
Over the course of the last six months, Marshall and his colleagues with the citizen science project Coral Watch have documented the degradation of reef structures near Lizard Island, one of the worst-hit areas.
They photographed the same formations of coral multiple times, showing clearly the pace of the destruction.
"It was a beautiful, wonderful paradise of reef structure and animals, and it's not there anymore. Or it is — but it's a slime ball, it's a gloomy place," Marshall says.
In this series of photos, you can see first that the coral is healthy – then, bleached. Algae begin to grow on the coral, which later intensifies, eventually resulting in disintegration of the coral and the loss of a habitat.
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6 comments:
From the full article: "Mass coral bleachings have only been happening for 20 years, and they are irrevocably, totally, absolutely linked to man-induced climate change."
Do people really want to keep denying what we are doing to our planet?
Not politics. Reality.
When they say "bleached" in this article, they mean killed.
Greed ------is killing our planet.
Exactly right
Fukushima.
The runoff from the chicken manure used as fertilizer is doing this. When it has drained into the bay, it moves into the ocean killing the reefs. Purdue should be forced to make this right.
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