FILE PHOTO: Coral surrounds two small islands on the Great Barrier Reef, located off the coast of Queensland, near the town of Rockhampton, in Australia, November 15, 2018. REUTERS/David Gray
SYDNEY — A study released on Friday by an Australian university looking at multiple catastrophes hitting the Great Barrier Reef has found for the first time that only 2% of its area has escaped bleaching since 1998, then the world’s hottest year on record.
If global warming is kept to 1.5 degrees [Celsius], the maximum rise in average global temperature that was the focus of the COP26 United Nations climate conference, the mix of corals on the Great Barrier Reef will change but it could still thrive, said the study’s lead author Professor Terry Hughes, of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.
“If we can hold global warming to 1.5°C global average warming then I think we’ll still have a vibrant Great Barrier Reef,” he said.
Bleaching is a stress response by overheated corals during heat waves, where they lose their color and many struggle to survive. Eighty percent of the World Heritage-listed wonder has been bleached severely at least once since 2016, the study by James Cook University in Australia’s Queensland state found.
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“Even the most remote, most pristine parts of the Great Barrier Reef have now bleached severely at least once,” Hughes said.
The study found the corals adapted to have a higher heat threshold if they had survived a previous bleaching event, but the gap between bleaching events has shrunk, giving the reefs less time to recover between each episode.
