From off the coast of Australia comes sad news that the Great Barrier Reef may not be as great for future generations as it has been for us. In a blink of geologic time, it may not even be a reef much longer:
“This is, by far, the worst bleaching they’ve seen on the Great Barrier Reef,” said Mark Eakin, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch, which partners with the Australian National Coral Bleaching Taskforce. “Our climate model-based Four Month Bleaching Outlook was predicting that severe bleaching was likely for the GBR back in December. Unfortunately, we were right and much of the reef has bleached, especially in the north.”
Coral Bleaching occurs when the life-giving symbiotic bacteria that inhabits the tissues of these ancient animals dies off, leaving behind a sterile, stony-white exoskeleton that soon crumbles into dust. We know from direct observation that these white patches can grow like tumors, link up, and destroy a once vast, vibrant reef system in the space of a few short years. The underlying culprit almost always turns out to be a change in the local environment. While pollution and development can have that kind of impact, what’s happening to the Great Barrier Reef is a long predicted consequence of a chemical cascade set off by warmer water, i.e., climate change.
The term climate change might not be appropriate any longer. Only time will tell. But if these recent alarming trends in temperature and biological damage continue to escalate, we may soon look back and realize this as the beginning days of the first, full blown global climate emergency, with far-ranging consequences for every region on Earth, bearing down faster than we ever thought possible.