Brisbane, Australia. An aerial assessment of the Great Barrier Reef revealed that coral bleaching extends across eastern Australia for the third time in five years.
Bleaching has impacted all three regions of the world’s largest coral system and is more extensive than at any other point in its history, scientists from James Cook University in the state of Queensland reported Tuesday.
Aerial assessments of 1,036 reefs in the past two weeks revealed bleached coral in the northern, central and southern areas, James Cook University professor Terry Hughes said.
“As the summers get hotter, we no longer need an El Niño event to trigger massive bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef scale,” Hughes said. “Of the five events we have recorded so far, only those in 1998 and 2016 occurred during El Niño conditions.”
El Niño is a weather pattern that begins with bands of warm ocean water in the central and central-eastern Pacific around the equator and affects the climate of the entire world.
The Great Barrier Reef is made up of 2,900 different reefs and 900 islands. You are unable to recover due to insufficient time between bleaching.
“We have already seen the first example of consecutive bleaching, in the summers of 2016 and 2017,” Hughes said, adding that the number of unaffected reefs is decreasing and the phenomenon is increasing.
He commented that underwater studies will be carried out throughout the year to assess the severity of the damage.
In early March, David Wachenfeld, chief scientist at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, said the reef was facing a critical period of heat stress in the coming weeks after the most extensive coral bleaching it has ever recorded. area.
The authority, the government agency that manages coral reef expansion in Northeast Australia, said ocean temperatures over the next month would be critical in determining how coral recovers from heat bleaching.
“The forecasts … indicate that we can expect current levels of heat stress for at least the next two weeks, and perhaps as long as three or four weeks,” Wachenfeld said in his weekly report on reef health.
“So this is a crucial time for the reef and it will be the weather conditions of the next two to four weeks that will determine the end result,” he said.
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