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The State Of The World’s Coral Reefs Is Getting Dire

This May 2016 photo provided by NOAA shows bleaching and some dead coral around Jarvis Island, which is part of the U.S. Pacific Remote Marine National Monument. CREDIT: BERNARDO VARGAS-ANGEL/NOAA VIA AP
This May 2016 photo provided by NOAA shows bleaching and some dead coral around Jarvis Island, which is part of the U.S. Pacific Remote Marine National Monument. CREDIT: BERNARDO VARGAS-ANGEL/NOAA VIA AP

Warmer-than-usual waters have been causing major stress for corals around the world for the past two years, and they aren’t likely to get a break anytime soon.

On Monday at the International Coral Reef Symposium in Hawaii, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) unveiled projections that show that water temperatures will be high enough in the coming months to carry the global bleaching event into a third year. Already, the bleaching event, which started in 2014, is the longest in global history — stretching into a third year would be “unprecedented,” NOAA says.

Bleaching is a grave threat to coral reefs. Corals, which are made up of tiny polyps that live symbiotically with photosynthetic algae, expel that algae when they get stressed by things like pollution or too-warm or too-cold water. This algae gives the coral its color, so when it’s expelled, the coral turns white. Its photosynthetic abilities also provide food for the coral, so without the algae, the coral is greatly weakened; if ocean temperatures don’t fall quickly enough for the algae to recolonize the coral, it can die.

Right now, wide swaths of the world’s coral are being bleached, thanks to warm water temperatures brought on by climate change and El Niño. According to NOAA, as of April, 93 percent of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia was bleached. This bleaching has stressed corals in the Great Barrier Reef so heavily that over a third have died.

This photo provided by NOAA, taken in May 2016 shows bleaching and some dead coral around Jarvis Island, which is part of the U.S. Pacific Remote Marine National Monument. CREDIT: NOAA/Bernardo Vargas-Angel via AP
This photo provided by NOAA, taken in May 2016 shows bleaching and some dead coral around Jarvis Island, which is part of the U.S. Pacific Remote Marine National Monument. CREDIT: NOAA/Bernardo Vargas-Angel via AP

Scientists have been upfront about the tragedy unfolding among the world’s coral reefs.

“This has been the saddest research trip of my life,” Terry Hughes, convenor of the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce, said after visiting the Great Barrier Reef in March. “Almost without exception, every reef we flew across showed consistently high levels of bleaching, from the reef slope right up onto the top of the reef.”

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Now, as there’s a high possibility of a La Niña weather pattern developing this year and bringing high temperatures to the western Pacific Ocean, NOAA is warning that far more corals are at risk of being exposed to the warm waters that cause bleaching. The bleaching, according to the agency, “will hit the U.S. hard, especially in Hawaii, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Florida Keys, U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. The deeper reefs in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, 100 miles off the coast of Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, are also in the crosshairs.” There’s also a 90 percent chance that coral reefs in Palau and Micronesia will see widespread bleaching during La Nina.

“It’s time to shift this conversation to what can be done to conserve these amazing organisms in the face of this unprecedented global bleaching event,” Jennifer Koss, NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program director, said in a statement.

Climate Change Is Driving Ocean Oxygen Levels Down, And That’s a Big Problem For Marine EcosystemsClimate by CREDIT: shutterstock Scientists know that climate change is slowly robbing the oceans of their oxygen, but…thinkprogress.orgConservation efforts — protecting coral reefs from being overfished or over-visited — do help, she noted. Last week, scientists from Stanford published a study that highlighted 15 coral reef “bright spots” around the world, places where reefs were, surprisingly, healthy and teeming with fish. Most of these reefs, the study found, were managed by humans: specifically, “strong local involvement in how the reefs were managed, local ownership rights, and traditional management practices” were all apparent in these reefs. Other studies have found that protecting certain kinds of fish can be key to keeping coral reefs resilient: limiting or banning the capture of coral grazers like urchins and parrotfish has been found to be extremely effective in keeping coral reefs resilient.

But these conservation measures aren’t enough to protect corals from bleaching in the long term, Koss said. For that, the world needs to curb its greenhouse gas emissions, which on top of making ocean temperatures higher, are also increasing the ocean’s acidity, which makes it hard for corals and other calcium carbonate creatures to grow. And it needs to do it fast.

“What we have to do is to really translate the urgency,” Ruth Gates, president of the International Society for Reef Studies, said during the coral reef conference in Hawaii Monday. The situation facing coral reefs, she said, is “dire.”