coral

Normally, when a ship sets sail, one of the goals is to avoid sinking. However, USNS Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg cast off yesterday with the express purpose of ending up at the bottom of the briny deep. Purchased by Key West for $8.6 million, the former U.S. Navy ship was then sunk by demolition experts to provide a platform for a new coral reef.

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Over the last few years, knowledge about the effects of rising heat and CO2 levels in the atmosphere on coral reefs, those bizarre, multicultural underwater gardens, has proliferated. One of the newest reports, published this past March, predicts that if atmospheric carbon levels reach double what they are now – 750 parts per million – coral reefs will start to grow so slowly that they won’t keep themselves from dissolving.

Coral has already been dubbed a canary in a coalmine, due to its sensitivity to temperature and acidity, which make it a kind of first warning for the environmental changes wrought by rising global temperature and atmospheric carbon. We dive in to that canary-like sensitivity, and the complex life of a reef, in this new PopSci Comic.

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Until last December, no one had ever seen the bottom of the Tasman Fracture, a trench that drops more than four kilometers below the surface of the ocean. A group of Australian and American researchers recently spent a month hundreds of kilometers southwest of the Tasmanian coast, exploring the fracture's depths. Jess Adkins, a professor at Caltech and one of the project's lead scientists, remembers sitting in his control room and watching the underwater life on his monitors with a sense of awe.

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Last spring, scientists from the Queensland Museum in South Brisbane, Australia, discovered this new coral species hanging underneath a rocky ledge about 50 feet deep off the northern end of Australia’s Lizard Island. They now hope to classify the coral, along with hundreds of other recently discovered marine invertebrates.

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Time and time again we hear news about the danger the world's coral reefs are in. Now, the first-ever comprehensive international assessment of their conservation status reveals that the fate of coral is worse even than scientists previously believed.

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Climate change, urban and industrial pollution, mining and overfishing are just some of the threats to coral reefs worldwide. A recent European Commission study now adds sunscreen lotions to that list. The paper states that up to ten percent of the world’s coral reefs—composed of marine organisms with external skeletons—are subject to bleaching due to chemicals in the sunscreens worn by beach-going tourists.

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