The Great Barrier Reef, the fishing, diving and tourist destination stretching hundreds of miles off the coast of Australia near Cairns, is in trouble. A new study, published today in Nature, says that huge sections of the coral ecosystem are already dead, or are dying, because of rising sea temperatures. (When the water is too hot, corals turn white, as in the picture above.)
“We didn’t expect to see this level of destruction to the Great Barrier Reef for another 30 years,” said Terry P. Hughes, an Australian scientist and lead author of the Nature report. “In the north I saw hundreds of reefs – literally two-thirds of the reefs were dying and are now dead.”
In aerial surveys and underwater measurements, the scientist found that 67 percent of the corals had died in a long northern section of the reef. Even in the most heavily visited sections near Cairns, rising water temperatures have started another round of bleaching, the scientists said.
Here’s a full report from The New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/science/great-barrier-reef-coral-climate-change-dieoff.html
