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Climate Change Drives Collapse Of Baby Corals In Great Barrier Reef
The catastrophic die-off from recent ocean heat waves severely affected the reef’s ability to produce new corals and bounce back.
Chris DÁngelo
- HuffPost
The deadly back-to-back bleaching events that hammered Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in 2016 and 2017 led to a collapse in the recruitment of new corals, severely affecting the ecosystem’s ability to recover from the devastation.
That’s according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, which found that the number of juvenile corals that settled across the entire Great Barrier Reef in 2018 was 89 percent lower than historical averages before major bleaching events.
The loss of so many mature adults during the climate-change-driven ocean heat waves left the ecosystem ― the…