"It's Not Supposed To Be White" - In La Nina Year, 1 Of Healthiest GBR Colonies Succumbs To Heat
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As the Guardian enters the water, the first thing Dr Adam Smith does is glance at his dive watch. It tells him the water is 29C. That is warm. Staghorn corals clinging to the reef edge come into view and almost all are partly or entirely white. Thousands of colourful reef fish, some graceful sharks, and lots of still-healthy corals share the space with the strugglers. Soft corals nestled in the gaps on the top of the reef are white. Other corals shaped like giant dinner plates are coping better – but about half are giving off a spectacular but worrying fluorescent show of pinks and blues.
“The coral is basically starving,” says Smith, the managing director of consultancy firm Reef Ecologic. “We’ve definitely just seen corals that are stressed and white. This is one of the healthiest reefs off Townsville and one of the best reefs on the whole Great Barrier Reef. So for these corals to be stressed and damaged … well, it’s likely it’s the same at other reefs down here.”
The UN mission to the reef will examine the state and federal government’s response to managing the reef and their policies. Last year, the world heritage committee ignored the scientific advice from Unesco that it should be placed on the “in danger” list because of the impact of global heating and slow progress on combating pollution running into the reef.
Coral bleaching across thousands of kilometres of the world’s biggest reef system is just one of Australia’s battles with the climate emergency. Bushfires, flooding, shifting rainfall, heatwaves and extreme weather are all being super-charged by rising greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. The reef’s marine park authority is waiting until its aerial surveys are completed before it can compare this bleaching to other events in 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017 and 2020. But this is the first time there has been widespread bleaching during a La Niña weather pattern – the phase of a cycle of shifting warm areas in the Pacific Ocean that delivers more cloud and rain, and cooler conditions, over the reef.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/22/its-not-supposed-to-be-white-one-of-the-great-barrier-reefs-healthiest-reefs-succumbs-to-bleaching