/ Temperatures have reached unprecedented highs in the Great Barrier Reef, threatening its survival if the planet continues to warm.
Climate change has caused the Great Barrier Reef and its surrounding waters to get hotter than they have in at least 400 years during the previous ten years, according to new study published in the journal Nature.
It’s a strong caution. The Great Barrier Reef’s future is essentially in human hands. Global coral populations are in danger of going extinct if temperatures increase further and fossil fuels remain the primary source of energy.
The study’s lead author, Benjamin Henley, a lecturer at the University of Melbourne and an honorary fellow at the University of Wollongong, warned in a press conference on Tuesday that “the reef is in danger, and if we don’t divert from our current course, our generation will likely witness the demise of one of Earth’s great natural wonders, the Great Barrier Reef.”
Reef-forming invertebrates called corals generate calcium carbonate skeletons. Henley and his coauthors were able to delve into the past thanks to the skeletons of corals, which can develop for decades. They develop into bands that resemble tree rings and can be studied by scientists. They have molecular indicators that, in some years, indicate heat stress. In particular, the oxygen isotope ratio and the strontium to calcium ratio are related to the water temperature during the corals’ growth period.
Sea surface temperature data from direct measurements taken before 1900 are inconsistent. However, by combining accessible data from direct observations with information from skeleton core samples, the researchers were able to create a statistical model that allowed them to reconstruct temperatures as far back as the 1600s. They concentrated on the months of January through March, which are typically the hottest for the waters surrounding Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.That’s how they found that the temperatures for the years 2024, 2020, and 2017 were the highest in four millennia. The most notable has been 2024, which is around 1.73 degrees Celsius higher than the average that was reconstructed from 1618 and 1899.
Corals will eject the algae that provide them color and nourishment when they are under heat stress. Over time, a condition known as bleaching may cause the corals to perish. A linked article on the topic published in Nature states that temperatures that are more than 1 degree Celsius above “normal” for the summer might cause mass coral bleaching events if they persist for more than two months.
The past year has marked the world’s fourth global coral bleaching event on record — wreaking havoc on reefs around the world and even triggering a race to temporarily relocate coral nurseries to land to try to save them. Global bleaching events also took place in 1998, 2010, and between 2014 and 2017.
Coral skeleton cores the researchers assessed showed hardly any stress bands before 1980, a sign that mass bleaching events were far less likely before then. Using climate models to look at potential outcomes with and without human influence, the authors of the paper conclude that “human influence on the climate system is responsible for the rapid warming in recent decades.”
Policies currently in place to slash greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels still aren’t enough to stop things from getting much worse. Global average temperatures are still on track to rise between 2 to 3 degrees Celsius higher than they were before the industrial revolution. Previous research has estimated that even a two-degree rise could be enough to wipe out 99 percent of the world’s coral reefs.
The Great Barrier Reef in particular faces the prospect of bleaching every year in the near future, coauthor and professor of marine studies at the University of Queensland Ove Hoegh-Guldberg said in the press briefing. “It’s very, very worrying to know that we’re quite close to [that] point, and I think this will happen in the next 10 years,” Hoegh-Guldberg said. While corals can survive bleaching, reefs generally need one or two decades to recover from severe mass bleaching, according to the related article.
Considering all of that, the world’s coral reefs stand to benefit from every fraction of a degree of global warming that we can prevent by switching to sustainable energy sources sooner rather than later. Though the reef may not be as ecologically varied as it once was, some corals may be more adept at adapting to a warmer climate than others.
If we want to maintain it, we must have faith in it, according to Hoegh-Guldberg. “We will set ourselves up for a future with coral reefs if we take the right level of action on greenhouse gasses and we seek out and protect corals that have a good chance of surviving this type of scenario,” the speaker said.
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/ Temperatures have reached unprecedented highs in the Great Barrier Reef, threatening its survival if the planet continues to warm.
Climate change has caused the Great Barrier Reef and its surrounding waters to get hotter than they have in at least 400 years during the previous ten years, according to new study published in the journal Nature.
It’s a strong caution. The Great Barrier Reef’s future is essentially in human hands. Global coral populations are in danger of going extinct if temperatures increase further and fossil fuels remain the primary source of energy.
Reef-forming invertebrates called corals generate calcium carbonate skeletons. Henley and his coauthors were able to delve into the past thanks to the skeletons of corals, which can develop for decades. They develop into bands that resemble tree rings and can be studied by scientists. They have molecular indicators that, in some years, indicate heat stress. In particular, the oxygen isotope ratio and the strontium to calcium ratio are related to the water temperature during the corals’ growth period.
Sea surface temperature data from direct measurements taken before 1900 are inconsistent. However, by combining accessible data from direct observations with information from skeleton core samples, the researchers were able to create a statistical model that allowed them to reconstruct temperatures as far back as the 1600s. They concentrated on the months of January through March, which are typically the hottest for the waters surrounding Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.That’s how they found that the temperatures for the years 2024, 2020, and 2017 were the highest in four millennia. The most notable has been 2024, which is around 1.73 degrees Celsius higher than the average that was reconstructed from 1618 and 1899.