Much of the Great Barrier Reef is bleached beyond repair

Marine conservationists fear the destructive bleaching of coral reefs, and a comprehensive recent aerial survey has revealed a massive bleaching taking place along the Great Barrier Reef, from Cairns to Papua New Guinea.

“This has been the saddest research trip of my life,” Terry Hughes, from Australia’s National Coral Bleaching Taskforce, said in a press release. “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. We flew for 4000 km (2500 miles) in the most pristine parts of the Great Barrier Reef and saw only four reefs that had no bleaching. The severity is much greater than in earlier bleaching events in 2002 or 1998.”

More destruction to uncover

Hughes added that his team hadn’t yet found the southern limit of the bleaching event.

“We’ll be conducting further aerial surveys this week in the central Great Barrier Reef to identify where it stops,” he said. “Thankfully, the southern Reef has dodged a bullet due to cloudy weather that cooled the water temperatures down.”

Driven by warming ocean waters, coral bleaching is the term that describes when a corals in a reef all lose their photosynthetic bacterial symbiants, which can be seen visually by a whitening of the reef.

Many research vessels and island stations have also reported the coral bleaching seen with these aerial surveys, and surveys in the water have confirmed what is seen in the air: The majority of reefs north of Cairns are currently bleaching and virtually all species of corals are affected.

“We could see extensive bleaching even among the most robust ‘massive’ corals,” said James Kerry, a project manager on the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce. “The fact that these hardy species have also turned white shows just how severe summer conditions have become on the northern GBR.

“Residents we spoke to in Cape York were shocked by what they are seeing, telling us that they had never experienced anything like this before,” he added.

“Scientists in the water are already reporting up to 50% mortality of bleached corals,” Hughes said, “but it’s still too early to tell just what the overall outcome will be. We will continue to conduct underwater surveys along the Great Barrier Reef in the coming months as the full impact of this mass bleaching event unfolds.”

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Image Credit: ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

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