by By Gloria Dickie and Alison Withers
(Reuters)-more than four fifths of the worldwide coral reef areas of the world were affected by devastating mass bleachs, which were stimulated by record temperatures and made many single-colored reefs turned to a ghostly pale color, the scientific authorities said on Wednesday.
The bleaching is triggered by anomalies of the water temperature, which leads to corals drive away the colorful algae living in their tissues. Without the help of the algae when providing nutrients to the corals, the corals cannot survive.
According to the International Coral Reef initiative and data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which Reef Health pursue, the fourth mass blade event of the world, which scientists explained a year ago, showed only a few signs of slowing down. Instead, it is most widespread with 84% of the reef areas – from the Indian ocean to the Atlantic to the Pacific – for a duration, which is expected to be bleached from March 2025.
Last year was the hottest and the first to achieve over 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial times, which contributed to unprecedented ocean temperatures and tripled the previous record number of marine heat waves around the world.
“The size and extent of the heat stress are shocking,” said Melanie McField, a marine scientist in the Caribbean. “Some reefs that had previously escaped severe heat stress, and we thought it was a bit resistant, suffer from the partial dials in 2024.”
“Bleach is always scary – as if a quiet snowfall on the reef had come down,” she added.
Earlier events in 1998, 2010 and 2014-17 took 21%, 37% and 68% of the reefs that were exposed to heat stress at the bleaching level.
At the beginning of last year, sea biologists warned that the reefs of the world had warned for months by humans by humans by humans induced climate change and the climate pattern of man induced ocean heat on the edge of the mass bleeding, which results in the unusually warm ocean temperatures along the equator and in the Pacific.
In December 2024 there was a weak pattern of La Nina, which typically brings cooler ocean temperatures, scientists hope that corals could recover, but it only took three months.
Instead, the bleach has spread further, said the coordinator of the Noaa Coral Reef Watch Derek Manzello. The solomones and papua new guinea were recently added to the list of 82 countries and areas, in which heat stress was registered in their waters bleached.
Scientists will need years to understand the global extent of the death of the coral reef, but they say that they have already observed the widespread mortality in parts of the Caribbean, the Red Sea and the Australia Great Barrier Reef.
(Reporting by Gloria Dickie and Ali Withers; Editor of Alexandra Hudson)
