More than 90 percent of the already-beleaguered Great Barrier Reef has suffered coral bleaching this year, in the fourth mass bleaching event in seven years and the sixth on record.
“This is heartbreaking. This is deeply troubling,” Simon Bradshaw, a researcher at the Australia-based Climate Council, tells the Associated Press. “It shows that our Barrier Reef really is in very serious trouble indeed.”
A delayed report published this week by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority found that 654 of 719 reefs surveyed between 12–23 March of this year had experienced some level of bleaching, in which high water temperatures trigger the corals to expel their symbiotic algae and lose their color, which puts them at risk of starvation and disease.
The severity of bleaching varied across the reef, with the worst effects seen in the shallows of the central part of the reef off the coast of Townsville, ...
