Report of Great Barrier Reef's death mostly exaggerated
Meteorologist/Science Writer
Friday, October 14, 2016, 3:31 PM - An obituary went viral on Thursday, proclaiming the death of Earth's largest and oldest living organism, the Great Barrier Reef. However, to borrow from the great Mark Twain, the report of this death was (mostly) an exaggeration.
For the past year, scientists have been reporting some very unfortunate news. Due to the unprecedented heat in ocean waters off the northeast coast of Australia, the Great Barrier Reef was suffering through an extensive bleaching event, unlike anything they've seen so far in the history of the UNESCO site.
This heat - partly due to the strong, record-setting El Niño 2015/2016 and partly due to the continuing impacts of global warming - was causing the corals to expel the colourful symbiotic algae that inhabit them. This sudden loss of the algae, leaving behind just the white of the corals, is referred to as "bleaching".
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In an April press release, Terry Hughes, the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, said "Between 60 and 100 per cent of coral are severely bleached on 316 reefs, nearly all in the northern half of the Reef," and reported that only 7 per cent of all the reefs surveyed had escaped any amount of bleaching.
According to NOAA's Coral Reef Watch:
While bleaching thermal stress has now left Australia's Great Barrier Reef (GBR), as reported in multiple articles below and by news sources around the world, high ocean temperatures these last few months did significant damage to the GBR. Australia's National Coral Bleaching Task Force (of which NOAA CRW is a partner) reported that of the 911 coral reefs it surveyed by air along the full 2,300 km of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), 93% of the reefs exhibited signs of bleaching. Of those reefs that bleached, 316 - nearly all of which are in the remote, usually protected northern GBR - displayed severe bleaching (i.e., 60-100% of corals were bleached on the reef). Divers surveying the northern GBR have also documented 50% coral mortality. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority now considers this to be the worst bleaching event in the history of the GBR.
While those are serious, alarming numbers, and they bring up justifiable concerns about the future health of the Reef, this does not mean that the Great Barrier Reef is dead or even doomed to die.
This week, however, Outside Magazine's website published an obituary for the Great Barrier Reef, penned by environmental writer Rowan Jacobsen.
The essay presents the plight of the reefs eloquently, and even highlights the failures of government agencies to protect the Reef, such as the Australian government having their section of the UNESCO climate change report removed, for fears that it would have a negative impact on the tourism that the Reef brings in each year.
Suffering a bleaching event, however, even one as extreme as what's happened to the Great Barrier Reef, does not represent the Reef's death knell.
That said, this is not something we should be setting aside, to be forgotten.
The Reef is still in danger.
El Niño may have abated during the summer, thus removing the heat stress, but recent observations have shown that the Reef is not recovering as well, or as quickly, has scientists had hoped.
Watch Below: Climate Council CEO Amanda McKenzie, Chief Climate Counselor Professor Tim Flannery and Climate Counselor Professor Lesley Hughes return to the Great Barrier Reef to document its progress, and the news is not good.
So, while the Great Barrier Reef is most certainly not dead, it is not doing well right now, overall, and recovery in its northern sections may be very slow. As Amanda McKenzie, Climate Council CEO, said in the video above, "what about next time?"
This is the concern now. The heat is off, for the moment, but if the Reef does not recover sufficiently before water temperatures along the northeast coast of Australia once again rise, the damage next time will likely be even worse.
Although it is obviously an exaggeration, Jacobsen's essay has brought the plight of the Reef back into the public spotlight, where it should be.
We can't neglect the Great Barrier Reef, or our responsibility to preserve it, especially since it is our actions that have endangered its health in the first place.
Sources: NOAA | Outside Magazine | Climate Council | with files from The Weather Network
Editor's Note: A previous version of this article included a misspelling of Mr. Jacobsen's name. It was an unfortunate typo, however it has now been corrected and we apologize to the author and our readers for the error.
