‘Can’t cope’: Australia’s great barrier reef suffers sixth mass bleaching event

A wide stretch of the Great Barrier Reef has been hit a sixth mass bleaching event, the marine park’s authority said Friday, an alarming milestone for the coral wonder that points to the continued threat of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.
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Government scients who used helicopters and small planes to survey 750 separate reefs across hundreds of miles last week found severe bleaching among 60% of the corals.
Bleaching events have now occurred in four of the past seven years, with 2022 offering a durbing first — a mass bleaching in a year of La Niña, when more rain and cooler temperatures were supposed to provide a moment of respite for sensitive corals to recover.

“We’re seeing that coral reefs can’t cope with the current rate of warming and the frequency of climate change,” said Neal Cantin, a coral biolog who led one of the teams observing the reef. “We need to slow down that warming rate as fast as possible.”
Coral bleaching indicates that corals are under intense stress from the waters around them, which have been growing steadily warmer. Last year, scients recorded the hottest year on record for the world’s oceans — for the sixth year in a row.
First, the stress shows up on coral reefs in bright, almost neon colors as coral, which is an animal, expels the algae that lives inside it and provides the coral with food. The corals go on to turn white as bone but can still recover if temperatures cool for a long enough period.

Scients report, however, that has become increasingly rare. From 2009 to 2019, a study from last year found, 14% of the world’s coal reefs were lost.
Along the 1,500 miles of the Great Barrier Reef, there are still large, healthy sections of coral, with sharks, turtles, rays and fish the color of crayons.

But there are also signs of damage. The blocks of underwater graveyards, with gray fields of brittle, dead coral covered in algae, have been growing with each mass bleaching since the first one occurred in 1998.
Coral reefs collectively support an estimated $2.7 trillion per year in goods and services worldwide, according to a recent report from the International Coral Reef Initiative. Their fish supply food to hundreds of millions of people, and they provide protection from the severe storms.