Coral bleaching has swept from tail to tip of the Great Barrier Reef, with aerial surveys revealing the potentially unprecedented damage from a marine heatwave along the entirety of the 2300-kilometre World Heritage ecosystem.
Almost half the reefs along the entire ecosystem (46 per cent) had experienced record levels of heat stress, with all three regions – north, central and south – having instances of extreme bleaching, where more than 90 per cent of the corals in one location are bleached.
Coral bleaching on the southern Great Barrier Reef.Credit: Grumpy Turtle Designs / Australian Marine Conservation Society
The results are contained in the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) reef snapshot released on Wednesday.
“This is one of the most extensive bleaching events the Reef has experienced in AIMS’ nearly 40 years of monitoring,” said Dr David Wachenfeld, research director at AIMS.
“It’s the first bleaching event where we’ve had extreme bleaching in the northern, central and southern Great Barrier Reef.”
Marine heatwaves are becoming more severe and frequent, and science agencies list climate change as the greatest threat to the survival of coral reefs.
A global coral bleaching event was declared on Tuesday by the International Coral Reef Initiative. Coral reefs in 53 places have bleached since the start of last year, including in Florida in the US, the Caribbean, the Eastern Tropical Pacific, the South Pacific, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Gulf of Aden.
Mass coral bleaching events have occurred on the Great Barrier Reef in 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022 and now 2024.
Source Agencies
