Bleaching doesn’t mean the entire reef is dying, but it does lose large areas, and those that survive are much more vulnerable to environmental fluctuations.
Aerial observations this month by Australian government scientists along the 2,300 km long Great Barrier Reef found “heavy bleaching” over 60% of the surface. Of even more concern to the experts is the fact that compared to the previous five episodes, this is the first to occur in a La Niña year, ie a year when the Pacific Ocean is slightly colder than normal . So what this means is that previous episodes, coupled with unusually warm temperatures, have left the reefs more vulnerable to new “environmental stresses.”
“We see that coral reefs cannot cope with the current rate of warming and frequency of climate change,” Neal Cantin, an Australian coral biologist who led one of the research teams, commented on the aerial observations in the New York Times. The bad news was announced on March 25 by the Marine Parks Authority, an agency of the Australian government. This is provisional data.
The five previous bleaching episodes took place in 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017 and 2020.
It is estimated that a quarter of the world’s marine life depends on coral reefs for some time or other. Not to mention the millions of people who depend on it for food, employment or to protect their shores from storms.
And reefs are often cited as a warning system for future climate change impacts — the equivalent of the canary in old coal mines alerting miners to a gas leak.
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