Australia's Great Diminishing Reef - Bleaching/Coral Death Moving Quickly

[hatrack]

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The reef is in fairly good health at present but marine scientists fear that all the hightech analysis will be for nothing unless the world can halt the global warming that is predicted to cause severe reef deterioration over the next century. Climate-change models, such as done by CSIRO, predict that Australian air temperatures will warm between one and six degrees over the next century, with slightly less warming near the coast. Sea temperatures will, after a few decades' lag, match this rise. Part of Marshall's job is to investigate how this ocean warming will affect the reef in coming decades and what, if anything, can be done about it.

"People fear this catastrophe where you get the whole reef dying," he says. "That's possible - if we get a hot enough summer, you get catastrophic death of corals - but it's not so likely. What is more likely, almost certain, is that every couple of years now we'll have a bleaching event that kills a few per cent of the reef. It takes 10, 20 years to bounce back.

"You get 5 per cent plus 2 per cent plus per cent... all of a sudden you've lost half of the reef to coral bleaching. It's that sort of chronic degradation that I think we're going to be seeing in the future." The first severe bleaching events, in 1998 and 2002, killed about a tenth of the reef in total, Marshall says, although the affected areas are slowly recovering.

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Bleaching this past summer has been particularly bad in the south, around Great Keppel Island, where entire reefs were turned a deadly shade of white. Bad though this is, says Marshall, it does not compare with 1998 and 2002, when the first alarm bells were triggered over the reef's future. "1998 was, at that time, the worst we'd ever seen. Then 2002 came along and was actually a bit worse... (on each occasion) we lost about 5 per cent of the reef."

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http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/great-barrier-grief/2006/04/20/1145344220538.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1