Global warming may soon cause us to lose one of the treasures of the environment, the coral reefs, fundamental for the protection of some precious marine ecosystems. The American weather agency NOAA has just launched the SOS on the arrival of their worst global bleaching, and consequent deterioration, in history. A reportage from CNN now tell how the situation in Great Barrier Reef of Australia is truly alarming.
The Great Barrier turns white
Let’s talk about largest coral reef in the world: immense, also a global tourist attraction, fundamental for life and biodiversity on our planet. Made up of over 2 900 individual coral reefs and 900 islands in the Pacific, it extends for 2,300 km and an area of approximately 344,000 square km in the north-east of Australia.
The whitening it also arrived here after the hottest summer, due to the ongoing climate change we are causing, combined with the effects of the periodic meteorological phenomenon called El Niño. Corals exposed to these heat waves they expel microalgae which give them color, energy and nourishment and become white. This bleaching could herald their death if the processes are not reversed, also threatening the species and the food chain that rely on their existence.
Corals sentenced to death
“What happens in our oceans is the equivalent of continuous underwater fires” he explains to CNN researcher Kate Quigley of the Minderoo Foundation. “We will have such large-scale warming that we will reach a point of no return.”
“Temperatures are so hot they’re off the charts…” echoed by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland in Australia and chief scientist of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation. “They have never reached these limits. Humanity is threatened on a level that I’m not sure we understand ”.
This destruction would condemn to a quarter of the species that live in these habitats have died, also threatening those who live from fishing nearby and the entire coastal environment, until now protected by coral reefs. Floods, cyclones and rising sea levels could become much more threatening.
And the alarm unfortunately goes far beyond the immediate one about whitening. Scientists predict that at the current rate of climate warming, temperatures could rise by 2 degrees by 2050in 26 years: it would mean the death for 99% of corals.
