Australia's Great Barrier Reef faces new mass bleaching
STORY: Location: Great Barrier Reef, Australia
The Great Barrier Reef faces
a new mass bleaching event
as 2021 is declared the warmest year
on record for the world’s oceans
It will be the fourth mass bleaching in six years
[Dr Jodie Rummer, Associate Professor of Marine Biology, James Cook University]
“It’s getting grim and it’s getting to the point where we can’t even simulate the combination of conditions that the reef is experiencing in a controlled laboratory setting."
Most of the marine park has been
hit by 'significant heat stress'
[Dr Jodie Rummer, Associate Professor of Marine Biology, James Cook University]
“We know that 2021 was the warmest year on record for the world’s oceans. We know that climate change is warming the ocean, it’s leading to more frequent and severe marine heatwaves. Over this past year, a lot of this excess heat has been absorbed by the oceans. And their calculations, which I thought were astounding, were that it’s the equivalent of like seven Hiroshima atomic bombs in terms of the amount of heat that is being absorbed. So those seven atomic bombs detonating every second. So it’s a pretty immense amount of heat that the oceans are absorbing and it’s much, much beyond what we’ve ever experienced.”
