An unprecedented coral bleaching episode has spread to 84 percent of the world’s reefs in an unfolding human-caused crisis that could kill off swathes of the essential ecosystems, scientists warned yesterday.
Since it began in early 2023, the global coral bleaching event has mushroomed into the biggest and most intense on record, with reefs across the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans affected.
Coral turns ghostly white under heat stress and the world’s oceans have warmed over the past two years to historic highs, driven by the release of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
Photo: Violeta J Brosig / Minderoo Foundation / AFP
Reefs can rebound from the trauma, but scientists said that the window for recovery was getting shorter as ocean temperatures remained higher for longer.
Conditions in some regions were extreme enough to “lead to multispecies or near complete mortality on a coral reef,” the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.
The latest episode was so severe and lasting that even more resilient coral was succumbing, said Melanie McField, the director of Healthy Reefs for Healthy People, which specializes in the Caribbean.
“If you continue to have heat wave after heat wave, it’s hard to see how that recovery is going to happen,” the veteran reef scientist said from Florida.
Bleaching occurs when coral expels algae that provide not just their characteristic color, but food and nutrients, leaving them exposed to disease and possibly eventually death.
Live coral cover has halved since the 1950s due to climate change and environmental damage, the International Coral Reef Initiative, a global conservation partnership, said in a statement yesterday.
Scientists forecast that at 1.5°C of warming, about 70 to 90 percent of the world’s coral reefs could disappear — a disastrous prospect for people and the planet.
Coral reefs support not just marine life, but hundreds of millions of people living in coastal communities around the world by providing food, protection from storms, and livelihoods through fishing and tourism.
Mass coral bleaching was first observed in the early 1980s and is one of the best known and most visible consequences of steadily rising ocean temperatures caused by global warming.
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