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Marine scientists tracked coral colonies in a remote area of the Great Barrier Reef and found that corals previously more resilient to bleaching suffered devastating and fatal bleaching during ...
Covering nearly 133,000 square miles (345,000 square kilometers), the Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef, home to more than 1,500 species of fish and 411 species of hard corals.
That makes this the fifth bleaching event in the Great Barrier Reef in just nine years - far more frequent than the twice per decade that scientists expected by the 2030s.
During that time, between 2016 and 2024, the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest coral reef ecosystem and one of the most biodiverse, suffered mass coral bleaching events.
The Great Barrier Reef experienced its first major bleaching event in 1998. Since then, bleaching events have increased in frequency, with three events occurring in the years 2016–2020. [53] Bleaching is predicted to occur three times a decade on the Great Barrier Reef if warming is kept to 1.5 °C, increasing every other year to 2 °C. [54]
Since 1990, calcification rates of Porites, a common large reef-building coral in the Great Barrier Reef, have decreased by 14.2% annually. [10] Aragonite levels across the Great Barrier Reef itself are not equal; due to currents and circulation, some portions of the Great Barrier Reef can have half as much aragonite as others. [17]
The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA), the agency tasked with monitoring the reef's health, confirmed that "a widespread, often called mass, coral bleaching event is unfolding ...
The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority considers the greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef to be climate change, causing ocean warming which increases coral bleaching. [ 64 ] [ 65 ] Mass coral bleaching events due to marine heatwaves occurred in the summers of 1998, 2002, 2006, 2016, 2017 and 2020, [ 66 ] [ 13 ] [ 67 ] and coral ...