The rainbow reversals of the world have become ghostly in seas around the globe.
The “most intense global coral blade event of all time” has so far beat 84 percent of the world tires and is further International coral reef initiative (ICRI)-a global partnership between nations and non-state and international organizations that focused on sustainable management of coral reefs on Wednesday.
The new number is far worse than earlier events that reached 21 to 68 percent of the reefs.
However, scientists say that the reefs and corals are not all dead and could still jump back if people take the right steps, including maintenance and cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Corals are small marine animals that live in colonies with colorful symbiotic algae that give them their rainbow colors and supply them with most of their food. But if the water gets too warm too long, the algae fill poisonous connections, and the corals expose them and leave a white skeleton, which leads to “bleaching”.
The current Global Bleaching event, the fourth since 1998, began in January 2023 and has scored various parts of the world in the past two years, in the middle of the middle Record temperatures.
A global coral blade event was officially explained in April 2024. Last year the earth of the earth Hottest producesThe oceans also broke out a record and met an average annual sea surface temperature of 20.87 ° C from the Poles.
According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Oceans all over the world have a mass coral event. This means that corals know or even die in every large ocean basin because the water is too hot.
No end in sight?
The fact that it lasts two years later leads the global reef in “Uncharted Waters”, Britta Schaffelke, researcher of the Australian Institute of Marine Science and coordinator of the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, in an explanation that accompanied the press release of the ICRI.
“In the past, many coral reefs around the world have recovered from severe events such as bleaching or storming,” she said.
But the length of this blade event and the fact that it will be longer until the day fears coral scientists.
Mark Eakin, corresponding secretary of the International Coral Reef Society and retired boss of the Coral Reef Watch program of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said it was an open question when – and even if – the current bleaching will end.
“We may never see the heat stress that means that the bleaching bleach falls under the threshold that triggers a global event,” he told the Associated Press.
Coral reefs in the keys in Florida were decimated by illness, human activity and rising sea temperatures. Susan Ormiston Susan Ormiston from CBC met the scientists who developed new corals in a laboratory and planted them in the wild to try to restore a critical ecosystem.
Valeria Pizarro, a researcher of the non-profit Perry Institute for Sea Sciences, who studies corals in the Caribbean, said that the bleaching aid occurred at the end of summer when the water is warmest.
However, the current event started in its region in July, and the temperatures are already 30 ° C to 32 ° C if they are normally 28 ° C at this time of year.
It also damaged very frequent species, she said and added: “It’s shocking.”
Nicola Smith, assistant professor of biology at Concordia University in Montreal, which also examines coral reefs in the Caribbean Coral reefs will drop 70 to 90 percent When the global temperature is heated to 1.5 ° C above the pre -industrial temperatures.
“We see it playing before our eyes,” she said. “It will not only look like in summer during the bleach, but all year round.”
Smith said that the loss of coral reefs could harm many fish and other sea creatures.
“They literally deliver thousands of other species with habitat as well as food and protection and locations for reproduction.”
The ICRI said that not only a third of sea life on coral reefs, but also a billion people – both directly and indirectly – rely on things such as food, tourism and protection against storms. It estimates that they teach 10 trillion US dollars to the global economy.
Not yet dead
Nevertheless, the ICRI believes that corals of this century can still survive when people take nature conservation measures and cut greenhouse gas emissions to slow down the ocean. And despite the dark news, other scientists say that corals often withstand and can throw themselves back from the bleach.
Melanie McField, founder and director of the florida -based non -profit healthy reefs for healthy people, said, even without her symbiotic algae with food, the corals starved very slowly.
“It usually takes months,” she said. “They somehow hang on it. Part of it is alive, it is sometimes dead.”
And even if the coral dies, other reef organisms such as sponges and crusty, pink coraline algae continue to live.
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“The Australians call it alive. So you still have a reef, you still have a few fish nearby,” said McField. “Everything is somehow brown and gray.”
But the reef is susceptible at that time because sponges, worms and other creatures eat in the coral that no longer resolves itself.
“And when this hurricane comes, it turns into ruins,” said McField.
She said that for people who live on coasts that are protected by the coral reefs can be scary: “It is life and security.”
All Coral Atlas is the first international attempt to map not only every reef on the planet, but also to monitor the changes to these reefs when our oceans are warm. In cooperation with local scientists, the Atlas could influence where quick work is required to save and restore coral reefs.
The ICRI estimates that to save coral reefs and the people who rely on them, the expenses for solutions have to increase around seven times. Things that could help are selective breeding, coral recovery, the reduction in pollution and the end of the overfishing.
McField said that so far many of these strategies are “very small efforts at this point” and more of them are needed.
But keeping the global temperature as little above 1.5 ° C as possible is “necessary to give these coral protection measures the opportunity to work,” said the ICRI.
McField agrees. “You can have all these efforts at 1.5 or 1.6 or 1.7, but probably not 2 …. Don’t go (or) I am not sure whether we can save them.”
