Authorities have moved the Great Barrier Reef onto its highest alert level in response to widespread coral bleaching. Months of monitoring will now be needed to assess the ongoing damage.
The Great Barrier Reef might get all the attention, but what about our western coral reefs? Warmer waters and human impacts mean these reefs are in trouble.
Many corals can’t make it through the bleaching events caused by warming ocean waters. But some can – and scientists are trying to learn more about the sources of their resilience.
Coral reefs are the poster child for the damage people are doing to the world’s oceans. Overfishing, pollution and declining water quality have all taken their toll on reefs around the world. Perhaps the…
Reef historian Iain McCalman, in Sydney, and reef scientist Stephen Palumbi, in California, are monitoring reef degradation from opposite sides of the planet. They compared notes. Iain McCalman: A recent…
Australia’s coral reefs and mountain-top ecosystems are set to suffer from climate change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest summary of the research. The threats to these…
Greenhouse gas emissions have warmed the oceans in regions such as the Baltic by as much as 1.3°C. It is now thought that 90% of the heat added to the climate system by humans has been absorbed in the…
The fire coral (Millepora boschmai) is one of the rarest species of coral in the world. It is known only from a small number of locations in the Pacific Ocean, Panama and Indonesia, and it appears this…
John Bruno, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
There is a myth about Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, that goes like this: because it is so big, biodiverse, so well-managed and generally bloody awesome, the GBR is immune to climate change and other…
The Great Barrier Reef has lost half its coral cover in the last 27 years, and it could halve again by 2022 say researchers from the Australian Institute of Marine Science. A study published today in the…
Unconventional tactics, including using shade cloth to protect corals from heat stress, must form part of future ocean management and conservation plans, argues a scientist from the University of Queensland…