The Pacific Ocean produces oxygen, helps regulates the weather, provides food and livelihoods. It’s a place of fun, solace and spiritual connection. But its delicate ecology is under threat.
Californians love their coast and strongly oppose offshore drilling. Will they support converting old oil rigs to artificial reefs – a policy that benefits both marine life and oil companies?
Recent marine heatwaves have devastated crucial coastal habitats, including kelp forests, seagrass meadows and coral reefs.
Dan Smale
Dan Smale, Marine Biological Association and Thomas Wernberg, The University of Western Australia
Marine heatwaves, like their land counterparts, are growing hotter and longer. Sea species in southeastern Australia, southeast Asia, northwestern Africa, Europe and eastern Canada are most at risk.
Solenosmilia coral reef with unidentified solitary yellow corals.
CSIRO
A massive new discovery this summer of miles of corals in deep waters off South Carolina shows how much we have yet to learn about life on the ocean floor.
A healthy coral reef on Millennium Atoll, Southern Line Islands.
Brian Zgliczynski
Field samples, satellite measurements and isotopic data have shed new light on corals’ eating habits.
Staghorn and tabular corals suffered mass die-offs, robbing many individual reefs of their characteristic shapes.
ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies/ Mia Hoogenboom
The 2016 bleaching event resulted in 30% mortality on the Great Barrier Reef, with many corals dying of the heat before they bleached and the loss of branching corals creating less complex reef structure.
The increasingly bleached coral at Black Point on the Cobourg Peninsula is a worrying sign of what’s to come for other coral reefs in Australia.
Alan Withers
Coral reefs in the Asia-Pacific have been deluged with an estimated 11.1 billion pieces of plastic waste, increasing the risk of coral disease more than 20-fold.
Giant triton molluscs are a useful ally in battling the coral-grazing crown-of-thorns starfish.
AAP Image/AIMS, K Goodbun
The federal government’s new funding aims to spread the net wide in investigating possible ways to protect the Great Barrier Reef’s corals. Winning this battle will require a wide range of weapons.
Some reefs are strong sources of coral larvae.
Peter Mumby
A new study identifies dozens of individual reefs on the Great Barrier Reef that are especially important for coral larvae dispersal and which could help the entire ecosystem bounce back.
How the Great Barrier Reef can be helped to help repair the damaged reef.
AIMS/Neal Cantin
Corals on the Great Barrier Reef that are tolerant to warmer waters can be used to help repair other parts of the reef damaged by recent coral bleaching events.
The southern Great Barrier Reef escaped both of the recent mass bleaching events. But time is running out.
AAP Image/ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, Tory Chase
Tropical coral reefs can be saved from climate change and other pressures, but the window of opportunity is closing. And reefs are guaranteed to be markedly different in the future.
A typical reef scene within the Chagos Archipelago.
Western Australia’s super-corals are adapted to high temperatures, but even they didn’t escape the recent bleaching event unscathed.
We think of coral reefs as a diverse ecosystem, but each coral is an entire and complex microworld of organisms imperceptible to our eyes.
Floriaan Devloo-Delva