“This is the third time we’ve had a global bleaching event”, Mark Eakin, coordinator at NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch, told Reuters, saying experts would have spotted such wide damage to reefs even decades ago when monitoring was less thorough. About 5 percent will have died forever.
Advertisement
The northern Pacific was devastated by a patch of warm water of unknown origins called “The Blob”. It can also determine the impact of coral bleaching to the oceans. “It very well may be the worst period of coral bleaching we’ve seen”, he told the Guardian. The agency issued similar reports in 2010 and 1998, two years that broke temperatures records. “So that means a lot of these corals are being put under really prolonged stress, or are being hit 2 years in a row”, Eakin continued.
Of course, this will threaten the entire existence of all coral across the plant. “Many of us think this will exceed the damage that was done in 1998”. The first image was taken when the XL Catlin Seaview Survey responded to a NOAA coral bleaching alert.
Underwater Earth, together with the University of Queensland, initiated a scientific expedition called the XL Catlin Seaview Survey.
“It’s certainly on that road to a point about 2030 when every year is a bleaching year…”
Hoegh-Guldberg said he had personally observed the first signs of bleaching on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in the past fortnight, months before the warm season begins.
The reef – the world’s biggest coral reef ecosystem – is already struggling from the threat of climate change, as well as farming run-off, development and the coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish. “It’s like a hospital patient”.
Furthermore, scientists hope to determine whether cold water can make coral reefs more susceptible to death or disease in the same way that warm water affects them.
The difference between this bleaching event and others before it is not just the extremity of sea temperatures, but how long they have persisted for. The middle Florida Keys aren’t too bad, but in southeast Florida, bleaching has combined with disease to kill corals, Eakin said. “It’s still a bit of a mystery”, Eakin said.
The progression of bleaching from healthy to dead on a reef in American Samoa this year. The previous years had coral reef destruction being predominant in the Caribbean oceans.
The world’s coral reefs account for only one-tenth of one percent of the ocean floor in terms of are, but are home to 25 percent of the fish species worldwide. “About 500 million people worldwide rely on coral reefs for both income and food so losing those coral reefs has major knock-on implications”. These factors include overfishing and pollution.
Advertisement
“We need to act locally and think globally to address these bleaching events”.
