Large Sections of Australias Great Reef Are Now Dead, Scientists Find

[brooklynite]

Source: New York Times

SYDNEY, Australia — The Great Barrier Reef in Australia has long been one of the world’s most magnificent natural wonders, so enormous it can be seen from space, so beautiful it can move visitors to tears.

But the reef, and the profusion of sea creatures living near it, are in profound trouble.

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.”

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/science/great-barrier-reef-coral-climate-change-dieoff.html

[Nictuku]

1. This breaks my heart (and mind)

[roamer65]

2. Just wait until we get to 500 ppm.

Life on earth is gonna start to get real tough. 500 ppm will be here sooner than we think because we still refuse to recognize and deal with the core problem. Global climate change is a symptom of human overpopulation.

[7962]

3. but how do you force people not to have lots of kids?

Most 1st world countries already have low birth rates, some so low they are negative replacement rates. Look at Japan, Italy, Russia, UK, etc. ALL have less-than-replacement birth rates. (Most US population growth is from immigration)But in the less developed countries we see the expansion of the world population. So how do we deal with this without being labeled everything under the sun; racist/islamophobe/anti-X/etc?

[NickB79]

6. Humans are ultimately still animals, and we all know how nature culls the herd

When the herd outgrows it's resource base

[NickB79]

7. At 500 ppm, anything within 20 degrees of the equator will be dead

Just like it was 56 million years ago: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1127108973

During the PETM, global temperatures jumped by 5 degrees Celsius above an already warm base-line over the course of about 6,000 years. And research indicates that the resulting heat stress set off massive wildfires, forced land animal species to move pole-ward, and killed off a big chunk of the ocean’s bottom dwelling foraminifera. However, past scientific consensus held that the tropics still managed to support life during the PETM due to a kind of thermostat-like heat regulation preventing the equatorial region from becoming too warm. Temperatures were thought to have remained within a range that would have continued to support life in this lower latitude zone. So it was only thought that the tropics experienced die-offs during ancient and more intense warming events like the Permain of 250 million years ago.

Which means a couple billion humans are either going to be migrating poleward, or dying of famine, thirst and war.

Or, they might migrate poleward, and STILL die of famine, thirst and war.

[Kimchijeon]

4. It's really sad.

I thought I read an article that had already proclaimed the reef is officially "dead" at this point.
It is a profound loss for the planet.

[OriginalGeek]

5. I saw that too but that was from a fake news site

i forget which one but it was jokes like the Onion. Only this one isn't funny.

the real report is still pretty bad though.