By Michelle Innis
...A large underwater heat wave (Click here) formed in the northeastern Pacific in early
2014, and has since stretched into a wide band along the west coast of
North America, from Baja California to the Bering Sea. Nicknamed the
Blob, it is up to four degrees Fahrenheit warmer than surrounding
waters, and has been blamed for a host of odd phenomena, including the
beaching of hungry sea lions in California and the sighting of tropical
skipjack tuna off Alaska.
Then
came 2015, with the most powerful El Niño climate cycle in a century.
It blasted heat across the tropical and southern Pacific, bleaching
reefs from Kiritimati to Indonesia, and across the Indian Ocean to
Réunion and Tanzania on Africa’s east coast.
“We
are currently experiencing the longest global coral bleaching event
ever observed,” said C. Mark Eakin, the Coral Reef Watch coordinator at
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Maryland. “We are
going to lose a lot of the world’s reefs during this event.”
Reefs
that take centuries to form can be destroyed in weeks. Individual
corals may survive a bleaching, but repeated bleachings can kill them.
Lurid reports of damaged reefs started coming in from worried scientists in the summer of 2014.9...
