The Great Barrier Reef has experienced its hottest temperatures in 400 years, according to a recent study. This unprecedented sea surface heat is causing increasingly frequent mass bleaching events, endangering the reef. The study warns that without stronger and faster action to combat climate change, we may witness the disappearance of one of Earth's great natural wonders.
The Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest coral reef system, is home to a wide variety of species including whales, dolphins, 1,500 types of fish and endangered turtles and dugongs. It was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981 and is a major tourist attraction for Australia. However, the health of the reef has been a point of contention between Canberra and the world heritage body.
Recent years have seen waters so warm that stressed corals, which form the backbone of the reef, have expelled the colorful and symbiotic algae that live there, causing “bleaching”. The Australian government has strongly resisted a possible downgrading of the reef's status by UNESCO to “endangered”, due to concerns about the impact on tourism and the resulting pressure to take action stronger climates.
The study's researchers hope that UNESCO will reconsider its recent decisions to keep the reef off the endangered list. They believe their study provides new evidence that the reef is at risk and hope it will spur further action on climate change and local protection of the reef.
The team's research involved taking samples of 400-year-old coral. They used a long, thin, cylindrical drill to remove cores from the coral skeletons, which were then analyzed to compare the composition of the pieces from centuries ago with those from more recent times. They found that the Australian summers of 2024, 2017 and 2020 resulted in the warmest waters since at least 1618. They also discovered several “stress bands” in the cores that corresponded with recent years of mass bleaching, which which suggests that severe mass bleaching did not occur in the 1800s and most of the 1900s.
The study also found that sea temperatures varied but were generally cool and stable for hundreds of years before 1900, but there has been a clear warming trend since then. Simulations comparing the condition of the reef with and without human activity that has caused climate change showed that the overall warming trend and recent extremes are due to global warming.
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