Mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef

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Aerial and underwater surveys of over eleven hundred reefs across the Great Barrier Reef in March and April 2016 found that only a small minority — around nine per cent of reefs surveyed — escaped bleaching altogether, with the most severe bleaching concentrated in the northern third of the system, the section that had been least affected by earlier disturbance and was widely assumed to be the most remote and therefore the safest. Follow-up surveys later that year recorded the loss of a large share of shallow-water corals in the worst-affected northern sector. The event is the pivot of this Journey because it broke the assumption that distance from human pressure confers protection: the northern reefs bleached most precisely because they were furthest from anything that could have been managed.

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