NOAA Projects 3rd Global Coral Bleaching Event Underway; Could Kill 6% Of Remaining Reefs
A massive coral bleaching event currently ravaging coral reefs across the globe could destroy thousands of square kilometres of coral cover forever, US government scientists have said. In figures exclusively released to the Guardian, scientists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) said about 12% of the world’s reefs have suffered bleaching in the last year. Just under half of these, an area of 12,000 sq km of coral, may be lost forever.
But the devastation is only getting started. The event could continue well into 2016. Noaa announced on Monday that the western Atlantic is about to heat up, turning the corals of the Caribbean bone white. When this occurs, bleaching will have hit every tropical ocean basin on Earth since June last year. In all, scientists forecast a total of 15,000 sq km of reef may not recover and losses to the world’s remaining coral reefs would be a devastating 6%.
Dr Mark Eakin, the co-ordinator of Noaa’s Coral Reef Watch programme, said that given uncertainties around how long the event will continue it was very difficult to predict exactly how much reef would be wiped out. “It probably won’t be as big as 1998, so we’re probably talking hopefully no more than 10%. Even if we’re talking one to 10% of the coral reefs around the world that’s a huge amount of coral reef area,” he said.
Global bleaching events have only been recorded twice before, in 1998 and 2010. Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, said Noaa’s figures, while rough, were decent estimates of the potential damage. He said, before 1998, bleaching of this magnitude had not occurred for “hundreds, if not thousands, of years”.
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http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/07/six-percent-of-worlds-coral-could-be-lost-in-current-mass-bleaching-say-scientists
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