Drained of colour, becoming ghost-like. This is what is happening to the world’s corals. The bright and beautiful are being ‘bleached’, from thermal stress. A great coral die-off is here.
Vulnerable at the best of times, conditions have combined to create a global mass bleaching of coral. The world could lose 5% of its corals this year — more than 12,000 square kilometers.
Temperature rise is among the main reasons. This causes stress to corals, breaking down the partnership they have with algae, a symbiosis by which they feed and which adorns them with their colour.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and XL Catlin Seaview Survey say global warming and a very strong El Nino Pacific Ocean temperature oscillation are bad news for corals in the Indian Ocean, the Pacific and the Atlantic-Caribbean basin.
This is the third such mass bleaching event, the others were in 1998 and 2010, but this time, worldwide, they say it will last at least two years.