<
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/may/01/great-barrier-reef-coral-bleaching-crisis>
"Beneath the turquoise waters off Heron Island lies a huge, brain-shaped
Porites coral that, in health, would be a rude shade of purplish-brown. Today
that coral outcrop, or bommie, shines snow white.
Prof Terry Hughes, a coral bleaching expert at James Cook University, estimates
this living boulder is at least 300 years old.
“If that thing had eyes it could have looked up and watched Captain Cook sail
past,” he says, back on the pristine beach of this speck of an island 80km
offshore at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef.
It is not just Heron’s grand old bommie that is freshly bleached. The
surrounding tangle of staghorn corals, or Acropora, are splashed in swathes of
white, or painted a dappled mosaic of greens and browns that betray the algae
and seaweeds growing over the freshly killed coral. Hughes estimates 90% of
those branching corals are dead or dying.
Snorkelling above these blighted coral thickets evokes the imagery of forests
annihilated by bushfires, or cities obliterated by missiles.
“It looks as if it has been carpet bombed,” says the Greens senator Peter
Whish-Wilson, who has accompanied Hughes to Heron. “Like limbs strewn
everywhere.”
Even Hughes, a man who has witnessed as much mass mortality of coral as any,
looks shellshocked.
The Dublin-born, Townsville-based marine biologist already knew the coral
ringing Heron had just experienced its worst recorded bleaching – and that this
was no isolated event."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
