The Great Barrier Reef, the largest coral system in the world and located in Northeast Australia, suffers the worst coral bleaching in recent years, alerted a group of scientists.
This is the third laundering in five years that the Great Barrier has suffered, covering an area of 344,400 square kilometers, after two other devastating consecutive phenomena of this type that affected it in 2016 and 2017.
“For the first time, this serious money laundering has impacted the three regions of the Great Barrier Reef, the north, the center and now large parts of the southern sector“Terry Hugues, director of the Australian Center for Excellence in Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, said in a statement.
The main cause of this phenomenon is the increase in sea temperature and, in the worst case, it can mean the death of corals and life around them.
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Hugues and his team s1,036 reefs were breached in the last fortnight of March to measure the intensity and severity of coral bleaching in this area considered a World Heritage Site and one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the planet.
LESS TIME TO RECOVER
Morgan Pratchett, who led the Great Barrier underwater study, explained that when bleaching is severe it is fatal to corals, just as it happened in 2016 when half of the shallow water corals died in the northern part of the Great Barrier.
“The northern region was the most affected region in 2016, followed by the central region in 2017. In 2020, the cumulative footprint of money laundering has expanded to include the south,” Pratchett emphasized.
Only a few reefs escape the impact of bleaching, these are those on the high seas, those in the extreme north and remote areas of the southern region.
The traces of each bleaching in these regions closely reflects the greater or lesser degree of warming of the waters in the areas affected by these bleaching.
“As the summers get hotter and hotter we will no longer need an event like El Niño to detonate a massive bleaching the size of the Great Barrier Reef,” Hugues warned.
The expert recalled that of the five bleaching events that occurred in the Great Barrier Reef, only those of 1998 and 2016 were caused by this phenomenon, while warning that the bleaching is occurring at more frequent intervals.
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