By Richard Shiffman
Scientists are reporting the second mass bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef in the last year. In a Yale Environment 360 interview, researcher Terry Hughes says these events have damaged two-thirds of the world’s largest coral reef and are directly caused by global warming.
The Great Barrier Reef, (click here) which stretches for more than 1,400 miles off Australia’s northeastern coast, has been called the largest living structure on earth. But the journal Nature reported last month that the reef is rapidly becoming the world’s largest dying structure. This assessment was based on a survey led by biologist Terry Hughes, the director of the Arc Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Queensland Australia. Hughes and his colleagues found that two-thirds of the northern sector of the reef has been badly damaged by a massive bleaching event that occurred over a period of several months last year....
...In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Hughes lays the blame for the recent destruction in the Great Barrier Reef squarely on warming waters caused by climate change. The catastrophic damage to Australia’s reefs is part of a global phenomenon that is threatening the survival of coral worldwide, Hughes says, and is a clear warning that we need to rein in greenhouse gas emissions: “We simply cannot afford to continue with business as usual. We are very concerned that these events are getting more frequent. The reef simply won’t come back if we have a bleaching event every other year.”...
