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solonavi 11 July 2007 Coral Reefs, Global Warming, Habitat 1,236 views 2 Comments Print This Post  Email This Post

MSNBC

Off Australia’s east coast, you will find the Blue Outback, a kaleidoscope of life that is the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s biggest structure built by living organisms. But it is under siege from climate change and warming waters that have twice bleached its spectacularly colored corals white.

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The mass bleaching in the summer of 2002 affected 60 percent to 95 percent of reefs in the marine park, according to a 2004 joint report by the World Wildlife Fund and the Queensland government. In some locations, up to 90 percent of corals were killed.

Full recovery could take decades, but that assumes no more damage, which is a foolish assumption, according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel projected in January that warming could lead to annual coral bleaching, potentially rendering the reef “functionally extinct” by 2030.

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..an increase in water temperature as little as 2 degrees for just four weeks can bleach the corals, killing the algae that give them their breathtaking colors.

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Worse, if the reed died, thousands of species, exotic and not so exotic, would perish with it in the largest marine life system in the world.

Since 1980, an estimated 20 percent of the world’s coral reefs have been destroyed, and the U.N. climate change panel warns that many spectacular fish and corals could be lost as soon as 2020 if the water continues to warm.

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The Australian and Queensland governments introduced programs to protect the reef waters in 2003, but a report issued by the Queensland provincial government found that officials have failed to enforce targets for reducing pollution in the reef.

About a third of the 135,000-square-mile reef was put off-limits to fishermen in 2004. That’s only one-quarter of 1 percent of all the ocean surface, but it supports 25 percent of the world’s marine life: 400 different kinds of coral; 1,500 kinds of fish, including the black tip reef shark; and 6,000 types of shellfish.

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The effects of warming go far beyond the death of the coral, because the structure itself supports an ecosystem of enormous complexity. If even one part of it goes out of whack, the implications are widespread, the reef authority says.

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Higher water temperatures also alter the gender ratio of turtle hatchlings — the higher the temperatures, the fewer males. And they threaten the habitat used by whales, especially humpbacks, for migration, calving and feeding.

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Marshall, the authority’s climate change manager, said there was still time to save the Great Barrier Reef. But not much.

“How much damage occurs is in our hands, and the worst-case scenario is a very grim one indeed, but the best-case scenario is a reef that is definitely worth working very hard to save,” he said.

Scientists warn that rising ocean temperatures could kill the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia.