Coral Reefs Suffer Fourth Global Bleaching Event, NOAA Says
Editor
16 April 2024 22:27 WIB
GLOBAL BLEACHING COULD BE WORST YET
With bleaching surveys ongoing in the Indian Ocean and Pacific, NOAA experts expect that this global bleaching event could turn out to be the most extensive yet.
Caribbean reefs experienced widespread bleaching last August as coastal sea surface temperatures hovered between 1 C (1.8 F) and 3 C (5.4 F) above normal. Scientists working in the region then began documenting mass die-offs across the region.
From the staghorns to brain corals, "everything that you can see while diving was white in some reefs," Alvarez-Filip said. "I have never witnessed this level of bleaching."
Bleached corals can recover if waters cool, but some Caribbean corals were so stressed that they continued to die even as temperatures dropped over winter, Alvarez-Filip added.
Florida corals subjected to extreme heat shocks did not even have time to bleach, Manzello said.
"They got so stressed, they just died and sloughed off their tissue," Manzello said.
At the end of the Southern Hemisphere summer in March, tropical reefs in the Pacific and Indian oceans also began to suffer.
A record-breaking number of individual reefs within the Great Barrier have suffered from heat stress in recent months, and many are now draining of color, said coral biologist Neal Cantin at the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences. Cantin noted that marine heatwaves were registering some 2.5 C (4.5 F) above the normal summertime maximum.
Recent aerial surveys have shown "very high" or "extreme" levels of bleaching in nearly half of surveyed reefs in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park area.
That makes this the fifth bleaching event in the Great Barrier Reef in just nine years - far more frequent than the twice per decade that scientists expected by the 2030s.
Indian Ocean reefs off Madagascar, Tanzania, Kenya and the Seychelles have also suffered bleaching, though not as severely as in 2016 thanks to an early change in this year's monsoon leading to cooler conditions, Obura said.
"The stress experienced by corals in the region is likely less than it could have been, which is very lucky," Obura said.
REUTERS
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