Mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef
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.
Observed — measured or witnessed, with the observation cited.
Subjects
- Great Barrier Reef · geographic_feature · Australia · not located
- Coral bleaching · ecological phenomenon · Global tropical reefs · not located
- Reef-building corals (Scleractinia) · species_group · Tropical and subtropical shallow seas, broadly 30 degrees N to 30 degrees S · not located
- Australian Institute of Marine Science · institution · Australia
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent. This is the standing of the weakest source, not an average.
Global warming and recurrent mass bleaching of corals
In the 2016 Great Barrier Reef bleaching event only a small minority of the more than eleven hundred reefs surveyed escaped bleaching, with the most severe bleaching in the northern third of the system, and water quality and past exposure did not protect reefs from it. V55 verification basis: not consulted; the survey design and headline result are stated from the producing model's knowledge, and the precise escaped-reef percentage is given as "around nine per cent" rather than to a decimal place.
Nature (Springer Nature), Hughes and colleagues · 2017 · Partly verified
Hughes, T.P. et al. (2017), Nature vol. 543 — aerial and underwater surveys of Great Barrier Reef bleaching in 1998, 2002 and 2016.
Global warming transforms coral reef assemblages
A large share of shallow-water corals in the worst-affected northern Great Barrier Reef died in the months following the March 2016 bleaching, shifting the composition of the surviving assemblage away from the fast-growing branching and tabular species. V55 verification basis: not consulted; the direction and approximate scale of the loss are stated from the producing model's knowledge, and no mortality percentage is quoted here because it could not be checked.
Nature (Springer Nature), Hughes and colleagues · 2018 · Partly verified
Hughes, T.P. et al. (2018), Nature vol. 556 — mortality and assemblage change on the Great Barrier Reef following the 2016 bleaching.
Recorded on Great Barrier Reef
- Darwin publishes The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs
- The Great Barrier Reef is inscribed on the World Heritage List
- Mass synchronous spawning described on the Great Barrier Reef
- The Long-Term Monitoring Program begins annual reef surveys
- The first global mass bleaching event
- A published projection that reefs would bleach faster than they could recover
- A measured decline in Great Barrier Reef coral calcification is published
- Twenty-seven years of monitoring show coral cover roughly halved
- The third global bleaching event
- Mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef
- A second consecutive year of mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef
- The interval between severe bleaching events is measured, and it has collapsed
- The fourth global bleaching event is confirmed
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.
- The fourth global bleaching event is confirmed · 2024-04
- The interval between severe bleaching events is measured, and it has collapsed · 2018-01
- A second consecutive year of mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef · 2017
- The third global bleaching event · 2014–2017
- Twenty-seven years of monitoring show coral cover roughly halved · 2012
- A measured decline in Great Barrier Reef coral calcification is published · 2009-01
- A published projection that reefs would bleach faster than they could recover · 1999
- The first global mass bleaching event · 1998