Obituary: Great Barrier Reef

How the Australian Great Barrier Reef Succeeds at Preservation and Sustainable Use and How it Applies to a Worldwide Problem

In 2018 English Broadcaster and Naturalist Sir David Attenborough said, “The Great Barrier Reef will be dead by 2100” Sir David Attenborough is not far off as already two third of the great barrier reef have either perished away or currently dying. Smart.Co must change everything with the introduction of Save The Great Barrier Reef foundation, the only way the world’s largest reef can be

In 2018 English Broadcaster and Naturalist Sir David Attenborough said, “The Great Barrier Reef will be dead by 2100.” Sir David Attenborough is not far off as already two third of the great barrier reef has either perished away or currently dying. Smart.Co is here to help Australia fix the great barrier reef with the plastic problem one by

The Great Barrier Reef is an iconic Australian landscape, listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1981, being the world’s largest living organism and being one of the seven natural wonders of the world.

According to Dr Wachenfeld said the spawning event on the Great Barrier Reef is significantly reduced. This is the worst bleaching event in the reef’s history. The far north were worst affected and unlikely to recover, as many corals are dead and those that appeared to be recovering remained highly stressed.

Coral reefs are natural formations that host around twenty-five percent of the world’s marine species, however, these reefs are majorly threatened (“Air”). The Great Barrier Reef in particular is an important marine location, home to major marine diversity with over 3,000 reefs over 1,400 miles (“Great” World Book). The Great Barrier Reef is a limestone formation made of coral polyps and algae, and lays off the coast of Queensland, Australia. For many years, this reef has been exposed to several threats. The threats facing the Great Barrier Reef include pollution, invasive species, and climate change.

The Great Barrier Reef is the world largest living expansion. Stretching more than 2,300 kilometers (approximately 1,429 miles) in length and over 344,000 square kilometers in area this phenomenon takes up a huge portion of Australia’s eastern coast, and even so large it can be identified from space. Seen on the left is an image taken from space of The Great Barrier Reef (Great Barrier Reef from Space). “The Great Barrier Reef is also unique as it extends over 14 degrees of latitude, from shallow estuarine areas to deep oceanic waters” (Great Barrier Reef Marine Park). In terms of composition, the reef is made of a variety of corals built upon dead corals built upon the continental shelf rock below the ocean surface. Sand and sediments carried by currents and waves get trapped within the reef thus expanding the reef more. The newest part of the reef typically faces outward, seaward, while the oldest part, comprised of mainly now dead corals, is more inland near the shallower waters. The waters in which the reef grows range in depth from ten to twenty five meters, with individual variations up to fifty meters in

One of the world’s largest living structure, the Great Barrier Reef is biologically rich and diverse and is Australia’s most remarkable, valued and remarkable environmental resources (Australian government). As the world’s most comprehensive coral reef ecosystem, the Great Barrier Reef is a site of unparalleled natural beauty on the north-east coast of Australia (unesco).

One particularly visible sight that brings climate change to the attention of the public is the series of large tracts of bleached coral on the Great Barrier Reef resulting from unusually warm summers. The Great Barrier Reef is an Australian icon, symbolic of the wealth of Australia's biological diversity. It is the nursery to fishing industries and is visited by thousands of tourists each year, bringing hundreds of millions of dollars into our community. While the high visibility of coral bleaching has made us aware of this impact of climate change we should be equally concerned

Among all the chaotic events that have been happening in 2016, this one has definitely stuck out to people. The Great Barrier Reef is one of the seven wonders of the world and the largest ecosystem to millions of species. The scientists declared that more than 30% has died at 25 million years old. The home of 1,625 species of fish, 3,000 types of mollusks and 30 different dolphins and whales has come to an end.

When people think of bleaching they might think about bleaching their hair which is damaging if repeated often or perhaps accidentally spilling bleach on a shirt and ruining it. But there is another type of bleaching that a lot of people don’t know about, and that’s coral bleaching. It affects a large majority of the Great Barrier Reef which is a primitive host of living things. The Great Barrier Reef is desperate for attention and it’s up to us to try and save it and prevent more damage from being done.

Marine Park Authority’s conduct an outlook report every five years which examines the Great Barrier Reef’s health, highlighting current and future pressures. This

Easily the most well-known natural World Heritage Site in Australia, the Great Barrier Reef, which is the world’s most extensive coral reef ecosystem, was inscribed with UNESCO in 1981. The site covers approximately 348,000 square kilometers and includes a wide range of depths, comprising of shallow inshore, mid-shelf, and even extending into oceanic waters 2,000 meters deep. The Great Barrier Reef is actually made up of around 2,500 individual reefs, encompassing some 400 different species of coral, which makes for some of the most remarkable underwater scenery in the world. The massive size and varying depths allows for a wide array of ecological habitats and species, making the reef one of the most complex ecosystems on the planet.

The Great Barrier Reef is bleaching at a significantly alarming rate. As scientists figured out it is contributed by three main perpetrators. The main culprit of the bleaching of the bleaching of the reefs is record warming water. This has been linked to El Niño and global warming. Next, acidification of the ocean from mainly human causes. Finally, fishing impacts have hurt the barrier a great deal. The northern part of Australia is bleaching much more rapidly than the south. The reef brings in a lot of tourism and money for Australia and losing it would also mean losing a lot of jobs for people as well. Scientists have noticed through the bleaching some coral species have survived and

Scientists have discovered a rapid kill in the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest reef. Divers have found up to 50% mortality in the reef due to coral bleaching. The government made a conclusion that the death of the organisms is due to the relation of rising temperatures in the ocean. In March of 2016, Russell Reichelt, the chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, said "The corals in the remote far north of the reef experienced extremely hot and still conditions this summer, and were effectively bathed in warm water for months, creating heat stress that they could no longer cope with." The warmness of the ocean water stresses the corals to a point that they release tiny algae, called zooxanthellae, that live within the