From Sumatra to the Maldives, Ocean is Warming … Fast
Recent reports about a spike in ocean temperatures off Sumatra and subsequent coral reef die-off takes me back to a pair of recent visits to the Maldives, where a similar mysterious warming killed off its reefs a dozen years ago. A just-released report by the Wildlife Conservation Society suggests as much as 60-80 percent of the reefs across the Andaman Sea from Sumatra to Thailand and Myanmar have been bleached by temperatures risen to as high as 93 degrees F, about nine degrees warmer than average.
The WCS labeled it one of the “most rapid and severe coral mortality events ever recorded.” While occasional cyclical phenomenon can drive sea temperatures up, Andrew Baird of James Cook in University in Townsville, Australia, contends this rise is “almost certainly due to global warming.”
I first went to the Maldives in 2004; just weeks after tsunami waves had nearly drowned the 1,192-island nation. Ironically the coral reefs surrounding the islands had protected them, absorbing the brunt of the wave. Sadly most of those reefs were already badly damaged. In 1998, thanks to shifting ocean patterns, which was then associated with El Niño, sea temperatures rose above 90 degrees F for more than two weeks, badly “bleaching” the coral (the killing of the symbiotic algae that lives within the coral and gives it color).
Between seventy and ninety percent of all the reefs surrounding the Maldives 26 atolls were estimated to have died as a result. Last spring I returned to the Maldives to see how the reefs were doing.
Swimming along the coral edge of what transplanted marine biologist Anke Hofmeister calls her “home reef” the line dividing the shallows and deep blue was exact. To our left in the brightly sunlit coral, hundreds of shiny reef fish darted and fed; in the dark blue, just to our right, which descended straight down a dramatic hundred foot wall, swam big jackfish, tuna and red snapper, each over one hundred pounds. An occasional spotted eagle ray elegantly flapped its way past in the dark blue below the surface of a calm Indian Ocean.
(For the rest of my dispatch go to takepart.com)
Its rubbish