What's killing all the coral reefs? | MNN - Mother Nature Network

Coral reefs are some of the oldest and biggest cities ever built, often dwarfing even the most prominent hubs of human civilization. Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest coral colony, is 440 times bigger and 1,300 times older than New York City, while the much smaller Maro Reef in Hawaii could still hold two Big Apples with enough room left over for Honolulu. Coral enclaves like these offer their residents and visitors a rare mix of food, shelter and socializing, growing into giant masses of aquatic commerce that play a key role in life both above and below the surface.

But after nearly nonstop activity for thousands of years, reefs around the planet are now suddenly becoming ghost towns at an alarming pace. A process known as "coral bleaching" has triggered near-record rates of death and dormancy in 2010, especially among Asian and Caribbean reefs, echoing the historic wipeouts of 1998 and 2005 — and foreshadowing a widely expected side effect of global warming.

"We're gonna get to the point where every year is a major bleaching year, and it'll be more frequent and more severe," says Paul Jokiel, a coral reef ecologist at the University of Hawaii. "And the driving force of all this is that we've been pumping an awful lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and that carbon dioxide is now warming up and also acidifying the oceans."

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Full article at mnn.com

 

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