I went to the very epicentre of the claimed latest severe mass coral bleaching event, at John Brewer Reef off Townsville, and found a coral wonderland.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has uploaded some footage of John Brewer Reef that is part of the Underwater Museum of Art, the footage was apparently taken by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in February. It does not show a lot of bleached coral, but it does show some badly bleached individual…
Many of the published studies on ocean acidification, especially those studies published in high impact journals and accompanied by sensational media reporting, have turned-out to be wrong, or at least exaggerated.
The Great Barrier Reef is vast: a network of coral reefs that cover an area about the size of Italy. It is in good condition. After all, unlike coral reefs in many other tropical parts of the world, Australia is a rich country with a population concentrated in the south – a long way from the corals.
Reefs are apparently in terminal decline. But how many species should an average inshore reef have? How many corals are there at Pixie Reef, near Cairns?
New resarch from the IPA reveals that records from living and fossilised corals show natural variations in temperature stretching back thousands of years.