Between the devil and the deep blue sea – why a sea change is needed for the existential threat faced by the Great Barrier Reef

There aren’t many of us who haven’t dreamed of a sunny escape to warmer weather – with days spent lounging on endless white sands, and crystal-clear waters heated by the warmth of the golden sun above.  But the illusion of the perfect vacation is soon to become just that – an illusion – because as global warming heats up the earth, the holiday paradises that we all dream of escaping to are under very serious threat.

The UNESCO World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef – long the subject of scientific study – is home to some of the most fragile ocean ecosystems in the world.  A delicate balance between its 400 species of coral and the aptly named Coral Sea, the Great Barrier Reef has, in recent history, become prone to mass bleaching events that turn once-thriving sections of reef into underwater wastelands, due to a deadly combination of climate change (which in turn increases the temperature of the water, and induces damaging tropical storms) and overfishing.

It is possible for bleached coral to recover – but only if the heat abates.  Coral can take hundreds of years to grow just a few centimetres, and so the recovery time post a bleaching event is therefore unimaginably long.  It isn’t just the Great Barrier Reef affected by this – although it is the largest coral reef system on the planet – but devastation caused from coral bleaching is a worldwide issue that warrants urgent attention.

According to researchers writing recently in the international scientific Nature journal: “Although coral bleaching can occur locally as a result of low salinity, cold waters or pollution, regional and global mass bleaching events, in which the majority of corals in one or more regions bleach at once, are strongly associated with increasing surface sea temperatures linked to global warming.  The first modern observations of mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef occurred in the 1980s, but these events were less widespread and generally less severe than the bleaching events in the twenty-first century.”

It is shocking – but equally unsurprisingly – that these same researchers have found that sea temperatures around the Great Barrier Reef are now the hottest they have been for 400 years, sparking fears that another mass bleaching is imminent, where vast swathes of this unique ocean habitat could be killed completely as a consequence.

The long-terms solutions are, inevitably, government action to tackle the immediate issues posed by climate change.  The problem, however, is the world’s dependence on polluting fossil fuels, and the unlikely cessation of their use.  But by working together at both a local and government level, it is hoped that the tide can be turned for our oceans’ coral reefs – before it is too late.