bleaching Not that coral reefs completely die, but they die Do not lose large areas And those who survived more vulnerable to environmental fluctuations.
weather notes Completed this month by Australian government scientists along the 2,300-kilometre Great Barrier Reef, they concluded that ” severe bleaching » On 60% of the surface. Even more worrying, in the eyes of experts, is the fact that compared to the previous five episodes, it’s the first to occur during a La Niña year, that is, the year in which the Pacific Ocean is cooler than normal. What this means, then, is that previous episodes, along with abnormally warm temperatures, made reefs more vulnerable to new “environmental stresses.”
“We see that coral reefs cannot withstand the current rate of warming and the frequency of climate change,” Comment in The New York Times Neil Kantin, an Australian coral biologist who led one of the aerial monitoring teams. bad news announced on 25 March by the Marine Parks Authority, an agency of the Australian Government. This is preliminary data.
The previous five episodes of bleaching occurred in 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017, and 2020.
It is estimated that a quarter of all marine life around the world depend, at one time or another in their lives, on coral reefs. And that’s not counting the millions of people who depend on it for their food, their job income, or the protection of their shores from storms.
and coral reefs Often qualified From alert system future impacts of climate change –What is the equivalent of a canary bird? In old coal mines, which alerted miners to a gas leak.
