Australia’s Great Barrier Reef corals—one of the world’s largest coral reef systems—is under threat from unprecedented bleaching. Scientists with the Australian Research Council released a statement in March that the coral ecosystem is witnessing “the worst mass bleaching event in its history.” The report was published in Discovery News.
Bleaching results when atypical environmental conditions damage corals for prolonged periods of time, such as warmer-than-normal waters. Corals react by expelling the green colored algae giving them a washed-out appearance resembling bleach, which can be fatal if the stress drags out too long prohibiting algae from regenerating.
This isn’t the first time bleaching has affected the GBR. Events were recorded in 1998 and 2002, but the current widespread bleaching is more prevalent according to experts. A marine biologist with the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., Rebecca Albright, has intimately studied the GBR since 2011. She informed Live Science that 95 percent of GBR’s northern reefs are revealing stress patterns compared to 18 percent in 2002.
Albright pointed to the familiar causes of the bleaching: one of them climate change, which is increasing water temperatures and a vibrant El Niño, a cyclical climate condition correlated with warmer-than-average ocean surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific. The effects are expected to extend through 2016.
But the GBR’s anomalies are only a microcosm of a broader issue: a global El Nino event is predicted, “the longest coral die-off on record,” according to a statement released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on Feb. 23.