Climate Change Has All But Destroyed Great Barrier Reef, Study Confirms

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Nadia Prupis is a former Common Dreams staff writer. She wrote on media policy for Truthout.org and has been published in New America Media and AlterNet. She graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a BA in English in 2008.

More than 90 percent of the Great Barrier Reef is suffering some level of coral bleaching and will likely never return to its original state, a new study from the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies released Tuesday confirms. 'We've never seen anything like this scale of bleaching before,' said Terry Hughes, director of the research council. 'In the northern Great Barrier Reef, it's like 10 cyclones have come ashore all at once.

In a best-case scenario, recovery of the northern GBR would take decades, and 'even then the reef will be only a shadow of its prebleaching self,' the report states. Hughes told reporters on Tuesday that 'close to 50 percent of the coral is already dead or dying.' Environmental activists say addressing the issue will require moving away from the use of fossil fuels.

 

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