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South Florida's corals are turning white and contracting fatal diseases in what's being called an unprecedented die-off across the region's reefs.
"We've never seen anything like this scale of bleaching before, said Terry Hughes, director of the Centre for Excellence of Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University. "In the northern Great Barrier Reef, it's like 10 cyclones have come ashore all at once."
Florida’s coral
reef is the only tropical reef in the continental United States,
stretching 300 nautical miles along its
coast.
Florida's reef system protects the shore and
and helps tourism, bringing in billions of dollars every
year. Its condition is deteriorating faster than scientists
predicted, and in a way that will accelerate as the oceans become more acidic, according to new research.
Acidification, happens as the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, may turn out to be an even more deadly threat. Corals can recover from bleaching events but ocean acidification is expected to increase as the climate warms.
University of Miami scientists called the collapse of the reef’s limestone framework, a critical habitat for fish,
“unprecedented” and “cause for alarm.”
“Lots of scientists think that ocean acidification is not going to be a problem until 2050 or 2060,” says Chris Langdon, a marine biology professor at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. “This is happening now. We’ve just lost 35 years we thought we had to turn things around.”
All around the world coral reefs have been in decline for decades.
Causes range pollution and human-caused destruction to bleaching events that occur when ocean temperatures rise.
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