NOAA - "It's Looking Like The Entirety Of The Southern Hemisphere Is Probably Going To Bleach This Year"

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For the past nine months, the world has repeatedly smashed heat records on land. But February marked a particularly unsettling record for the ocean: Average global sea surfaces climbed to the hottest temperatures ever recorded of any month since at least 1979, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. Fueled by El Niño conditions and climate change, these ocean temperatures are now pushing the world toward its fourth mass coral bleaching event, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced on March 5.

“It’s looking like the entirety of the Southern Hemisphere is probably going to bleach this year,” Derek Manzello, the coordinator of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch, told Reuters. “We are literally sitting on the cusp of the worst bleaching event in the history of the planet.” Three days later, officials in Australia confirmed that the Great Barrier Reef has already barreled past that cliff, and is in the midst of its fifth mass coral bleaching event in the past eight years. Scientists are especially worried about what this one could mean for the future of the world’s largest reef.

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If NOAA’s coral reef bleaching outlook comes to fruition, some of the world’s most iconic reefs could be at risk. Along with hurting the Great Barrier Reef, heat stress could be especially harmful for Florida’s corals, which have barely had time to recover after a summer marine heat wave decimated a large chunk of the population, as my colleague Amy Green covered. At that time, scientists and conservationists scrambled to move corals from the bathwater-like conditions to tanks on land, including a nursery of corals that conservationists from the Coral Restoration Foundation had been growing to help rebuild populations in the region, reported the New York Times.

In addition to these reef rescues, scientists around the world are breeding more heat-tolerant species of coral or planting coral gardens to help these ecosystems recover. But as the saying goes, bandaids don’t fix bullet holes. “The only long-term way to protect corals on the Great Barrier Reef and elsewhere is to rapidly reduce global greenhouse emissions,” (Ed. - Australian coral scientist Terry) Hughes writes.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12032024/todays-climate-coral-bleaching-great-barrier-reef/