Australia’s Great Barrier Reef may be on the verge of a massive outbreak of coral bleaching caused by sea temperatures soaring for the third time in six years.
“The entire reef has been in a bleaching hotspot for the past month, and excessively hot water is still spreading and intensifying,” says Tom Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance in Cambridge, MA who issued the first warnings of the last bleaching epidemic two years ago. The sea is currently up to 2°C warmer than normal.
Goreau predicts that this bleaching “will be the worst yet,” and will extend across the South Pacific to the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia.
