Huge
sections of the Great Barrier Reef, stretching across hundreds of miles
of its most pristine northern sector, were recently found to be dead,
killed last year by overheated seawater. More southerly sections around
the middle of the reef that barely escaped then are bleaching now, a
potential precursor to another die-off that could rob some of the reef’s
most visited areas of color and life.
“We
didn’t expect to see this level of destruction to the Great Barrier
Reef for another 30 years,” said Terry P. Hughes, director of a
government-funded center for
coral reef studies at James Cook University in Australia and the lead
author of a paper on the reef that is being published Thursday as the cover article of the journal Nature. “In the north, I saw hundreds of reefs — literally two-thirds of the reefs were dying and are now dead.”
The
damage to the Great Barrier Reef, one of the world’s largest living
structures, is part of a global calamity that has been unfolding
intermittently for nearly two decades and seems to be intensifying. In
the paper, dozens of scientists described the recent disaster as the
third worldwide mass bleaching of coral reefs since 1998, but by far the
most widespread and damaging.
The
state of coral reefs is a telling sign of the health of the seas. Their
distress and death are yet another marker of the ravages of global
climate change.
The Trump administration seems dead-set on reversing efforts to limit climate change. That isn't surprising-- he promised as much-- but I am surprised that there does not seem to be much resistance in Congress.
To my mind, the turning point was the failure to pass cap-and-trade legislation on carbon production. That would have both limited emissions and raised money for the government, and I am baffled as to why it wasn't adopted.
Is there a reason for hope?
