The Great Barrier Reef has a record-breaking annual sea surface temperature in the past decade: Evidence for oxygen bleaching or habitat loss by humans?
An assessment of coral skeletons has shown that the past decade has been the warmest for the Great Barrier Reef for 400 years. The temperature records were created because researchers looked at the chemical composition of old coral in the reef and figured out how much it had changed over time. In addition to showing recent record-breaking temperatures, they also developed a model that suggests that such temperatures are very unlikely to occur without human-induced climate change. The study concludes that the reef is in a state of disrepair and that a large amount of coral could be lost.
The researchers think the evidence might convince UNESCO to include the Great Barrier Reef in the World Heritage list.
The study focuses on annual temperatures in the winter months when ocean temperatures are at their peak. The new coral-skeleton record showed that the Coral Sea’s average surface temperature was 1.73 C above the 1618–99 average this year. The ocean warming trend in the record would not have been possible with the help of human activity, as evidenced by the model created by Henley and his colleagues.
Corals usually ‘bleach’ when they are stressed by high temperatures: they expel the colourful algae that live inside them and provide them with energy through photosynthesis. Depending on the severity and duration of the bleaching event, the corals might recover, or they might die, threatening the biodiverse ecosystems that provide habitat for fisheries, attract tourists and protect coastlines from storms.
The Nature Podcast: Exploring Tissue Diversity in Dry Environments with a Game-Theoretical Overview of an Extensive Tropical Rainfall
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Most researchers are familiar with the refrain ‘Publish or Perish’ — the idea that publications are the core currency of a scientist’s career — but now that can be played out for laughs in a new board game. Created as a way to help researchers “bond over shared trauma”, the game features many mishaps familiar to academics, scrambles for funding and scathing comments, all while players must compete to get the most citations on their publications. reporter Max went to write a story about the game and published his story on the naturepodcast.
A study reveals that, unexpectedly, plants display a greater diversity of traits in drier environments. Trait diversity is a measure of an organism’s performance in an environment and can include things like the size of a plant or its photosynthetic rate. Although there are good data on this kind of diversity in temperate regions, an assessment of drylands has been lacking. A new study shows that trait diversity doesn’t go down if you don’t show fewer traits at a certain level of aridity. The team behind the work hope that it can help us better protect biodiversity as the planet warms and areas become drier.
