The coral reefs of the world have been pushed to an “unexplored territory” by the worst world laundering event ever registered which has now reached more than 80% of the planet’s reefs, scientists warned.
The reefs in at least 82 countries and territories have been exposed to enough heat to make corals white since the start of the world event in January 2023, the latest data from the coral reefs of the American government.
The coral reefs are known as the tropical forests of the sea due to their high concentration of biodiversity which supports approximately a third of all marine species and a billion people.
But record temperatures of the ocean have spread like an underwater forest fire on corals through the oceans of the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Indians, damaging and killing countless corals.
The 84% of reefs exposed to heat in terms of money laundering in this fourth event in progress compared to 68% during the third event, which lasted from 2014 to 2017, 37% in 2010 and 21% during the first event in 1998.
Even the reefs considered by scientists as refuges from the growing heat levels of the ocean have been laundered, said Dr. Derek Manzello, director of Coral Reef Watch.
“The fact that so many reef areas have been affected, including alleged thermal shelters such as Raja Ampat and the Gulf of Eilat, suggests that warming the ocean has reached a level where there is no longer a safe for the bleaching of corals and its ramifications,” he said.
Many areas have seen money laundering over the years, including the world’s largest system of reefs, the Australian Grande Barrier Reef, where last week’s authorities have declared a sixth laundering event generalized in just nine years.
Australia, the other reefs classified by World Heritage along the Côte de Ningaloo in Western Australia have experienced its highest thermal stress levels in recent months.
Scientists on the other side of the Indian Ocean have pointed out that laundering in recent weeks affecting reefs off Madagascar and the East African Coast, including the World Heritage of South Africa Isimanto Wetland Park.
Dr. Britta Schaffelke, of the Australian Institute of Marine Science and coordinator of the Global Coral Reef Suitwork Network (GCRMN), said that the event was unprecedented. “The reefs have not encountered this before.”
“With the laundering in progress, it is almost overwhelming the ability of people to surveillance they have to do,” she said. “The fact that this most recent coral whitening event on a global scale is still underway leads to world reefs in unexplored waters.
“(For) people who spend their whole professional life to monitor and observe the reefs and protect the reefs, and live by their side and count on them, see something that it must be devastating.
“Ecological sorrow is real. People who spend a lot of time underwater see him change before their eyes, ”she said.
The GCRMN brings together the surveillance data of a state report planned next year, but Schaffelke said that even this report would not give a complete image of the impact of the event.
Scientists from the North and Central America, including Florida, the Caribbean and Mexico, were among the first to go up the alarm after record temperatures of the ocean saw extreme laundering in the summer of the northern hemisphere 2023.
Corals can recover from laundering if the temperatures are not too extreme, but the surveys carried out in the months following the event began to paint a table of generalized coral death.
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Through Florida, an average of one in five corals was lost. On the side of the Pacific of Mexico, an area lost between 50% and 93% of its corals. Almost a quarter of the corals were killed by heat last year in the islands from Chagos in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Scientists have described a “dead coral cemetery” in the northern section of the large coral barrier after having laundered at the beginning of 2024, which killed 40% of corals in a southern area.
After the extreme heat of 2023, Coral Reef Watch was forced to add three new threat levels to its global laundering alert system to represent unprecedented thermal stress corals.
Melanie McField, the founder of the Healthy Reefs for Healthy People Initiative in the Caribbean, said that the reefs were calmed around the world.
“The laundering is always strange-as if a silent snowfall had descended on the reef … There was generally an absence of floating fish and an absence of vibrant colors on the reef,” she said. “It is an aside pallor and an immobility in what should be a rowdy vibrant reef.”
Dr. Lorenzo Álvarez-Filip, a scientist of coral at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, questioned the reefs through the Mexican Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico after laundering in 2023 and again in 2024.
He said the most devastating impact was the loss of reef construction corals, such as Elkhorns, which help protect the coasts and support a multitude of other marine lives.
“Many colonies of coral that I knew well and which had survived an epidemic (a major illness) a few years earlier, died in a few weeks.
“The feeling of helplessness combined with the need to document at least what happened to me very anxious – it was particularly difficult when we were about to dive in sites where we knew that there were great aggregations of sensitive corals. In almost all cases, we ended up with a very depressing feeling when we confirmed that all the corals were dead.”
Dr. Valeria Pizarro, scientist of senior corals from the Perry Institute for the Marine Sciences which works on the reefs of the Bahamas and the Caribbean, witnessed extreme laundering in the Bahamas in July 2023.
She said that “in a wink”, shallow reefs have become white landscapes, with a generalized death among the stagus corals used in catering projects. Spectacular sea fans and soft corals died quickly.
“It was as if they were based with the heat,” she said.
“World leaders must really undertake to reduce fossil fuels and increase investments in clean energy and make it a reality. We need them to stop having it on paper and the news, we need it to be real. ”
