The consequences of climate change are being disastrous for thousands of species of animals and plants throughout the planet. In this case, we move back to northeast Australia to see the Great Barrier Reef that is suffering another massive whitewash for a second year in a row.
If this continues, what will happen to the coral reefs?
The Great Barrier Reef
The Great Barrier Reef is an ecosystem about 2.300 kilometers long that has been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. Bleaching is caused by rising temperatures in marine waters due to climate change.
It is still too early to know whether its devastating effects will be comparable to last year's bleaching, considered the worst on record in the Great Barrier Reef, where similar cases occurred in 1998 and 2002.
It no longer matters if this event is as bad or worse than the previous one, it only matters that the world's climate is changing and brings extreme events more frequently to the Great Barrier Reef.
Coral death
Last year's climate change bleaching wiped out 22% of the corals in the entire 2.300-kilometer-long ecosystem. Corals have a special symbiotic relationship with microscopic algae called zooxanthallae, which provide their hosts with oxygen and a portion of the organic compounds they produce through photosynthesis.
With climate change and increasing temperatures, these are subject to environmental stress, so many corals expel their zooxanthallae en masse, and the coral polyps are left without pigmentation. As they do not have pigmentation, they appear almost transparent on the skeleton of the animal.
Every year thousands of corals die due to climate change and at the rate that we continue to pollute, the temperatures of the seas and oceans will not stop rising.