March 19, 2022 By jennifer
The ABC uploaded some footage from John Brewer Reef it’s part of the Underwater Art Museum, the footage seems to have been made by the WWF in February. It doesn’t show a lot of bleached coral, but it does show some individual colonies that are heavily bleached – and lots of healthy beige coral. (Remember, my first short filmabout Beige Reef, explaining that most of the world’s corals are beige.)
I didn’t expect to hear about widespread coral bleaching. I watched the Southern Oscillator Index (SOI) hover around +10 (so a La Niña with cooler and more normal waters along the Western Pacific/Eastern Australia coast), seeing Global satellite temperatures are dropping with Australia’s February 2022 anomaly at minus 0.5°C – in other words, half a degree colder than the 30-year average.
However, according to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, water temperatures are already up to 2°C hotter (I’ll look up this data) and coral bleaching is the most common and severe in the downtown area with ‘most severely bleached coral reefs beyond Townsville.
I’ve been wanting to film coral bleaching ever since I visited the Ribbon Reef in January 2020. Do you remember the next short, my second short film, after all the swimming, only to find The Monolith and other famous corals fully recovered from what was reported to have devastated coral bleaching in 2016? I was too late. Monolith is back to being a vibrant beige color.
More recently, I was on Heron Island looking for coral bleaching. I was shown all the corals that had been completely bleached in early 2020, but by November 2021 when I visited they were fully restored. I was too late. I was told that the bleaching process lasted for two months, with no significant percentage of coral dying.
In my experience, bleached corals are very difficult to find in the Great Barrier Reef. The corals either bleached or quickly recovered – before I got there – or seemed to have rotted and disintegrated so there was no evidence of them. Remember, we found some dead plate corals, covered in algae, at Britomart Reef and I showed them in my third film, Search Porites. We hypothesized that those patches of coral died from bleaching, but I didn’t see any real bleaching during a weeklong trip to Myrmidon Reef that also involved swimming. and find.
If I do end up getting some footage of the massive coral bleaching and it’s during La Niña, I won’t complain.
I’ve been wanting to visit a heavily bleached reef and photograph it in that state so I can monitor its recovery for a while.
Remember, I went to Pixie Reef and with Leo and Stuart, got all the footage of that cut and all the photos of that cut in February 2021 – this reef is clearly a of the worst bleached reefs according to a peer-reviewed publication by Terry Hughes. (Scroll down from the link to Pixie reef data page 2021 and you can open up 360 photos from the 36 cutouts placed in February 2021 at this reef and think for yourself about the state of this reef.)
Much of Pixie Reef, which looks bleached from a drone at 120 metres, is about the same height Terry Hughes was flying at when he conducted his surveys out of the plane’s windows.
When you get down to Earth and stay underwater, Pixie Reef is also very healthy. I will visit it again, soon, to check how it is this year.
Be sure to know what I find when I visit the reefs off Townsville and Cairns, consider subscribing to my monthly e-newsletter. (Email is usually sent on the last day of each month – if you can’t find it, check your junk folder.)
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If you’re wondering what I was looking at as I hovered over the coral at Pixie Reef (face down) while Stuart photographed me from a drone 120 meters high, it’s blue coral. lam/Acropora in the featured photo at the top of this blog post. This reef, Pixie Reef, is listed as one of the worse bleached corals of all the Great Barrier Reef, but we found it to be very healthy.
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