This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The Australian summer just gone will be remembered as the moment when human-caused climate change struck hard. First came drought, then deadly bushfires, and now a bout of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef—the third in just five years. Tragically, the 2020 bleaching is severe and the most widespread we have ever recorded.
Coral bleaching at regional scales is caused by spikes in sea temperatures during unusually hot summers. The first recorded mass bleaching event along the Great Barrier Reef occurred in 1998, then the hottest year on record. Since then, we’ve seen four more mass bleaching events—and more temperature records broken—in 2002, 2016, 2017, and again in 2020.
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Source: Ars Technica – Great Barrier Reef survey: “What we saw was an utter tragedy”