A severely bleached branching coral is nestled next to minimally bleached boulder coral.ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR CORAL REEF STUDIES, GERGELY TORDAA long-lasting oceanic heat wave in 2016 roasted the Great Barrier Reef, killing so many corals that the reef may never fully recover, researchers report today (April 18) in Nature.
“This paper is a grim post-mortem of an event that may very well mark the beginning of the end for many iconic reefs as we know them today, at least for the foreseeable future,” Kim Cobb, a coral reef expert at Georgia Tech University who was not involved in the study, tells The Washington Post.
Corals die in a phenomenon called bleaching. Warm ocean temperatures stress the corals, causing them to kick out symbiotic algae, which drains the corals of their color. Without their algal partners, the corals starve and die.
Ecologist Terry Hughes of James Cook University in Australia and his colleagues tracked coral death along the 2,300-kilometer Great Barrier Reef during and after the 2016 marine heat wave. Nearly half of the coral—around ...
