Earth Equity News

Is the End In Sight for the World’s Coral Reefs? By J.E.N. Veron,YaleEnviro360, 12/6/10. “It is a difficult idea to fathom… [especially] for me, an Australian marine scientist who has spent the past 40 years working on reefs the world over… But the science is clear: Unless we change the way we live, the Earth's coral reefs will be utterly destroyed within our children's lifetimes… Great Barrier Reef -- the biggest structure ever made by life on Earth… will not be there for our children’s children to enjoy unless we drastically change our priorities and the way we live… As with temperature, the oceans act as a huge repository, absorbing and buffering any excess CO2 in the atmosphere… All organisms that produce calcium carbonate skeletons (including shells, crabs, sea urchins, corals, coralline algae, calcareous phytoplankton, and many others) depend on their ability to deposit calcium carbonate, and this process is largely controlled by the prevailing water chemistry. As alkalinity decreases, precipitation of calcium carbonate becomes more and more difficult until eventually it is inhibited altogether. The potential consequences of such acidification are nothing less than catastrophic…

“A particularly galling aspect of the past four mass extinction events (very little is known about the first) is that, following them, reefs disappeared -- not just for a few tens of thousands of years, but for millions of years -- long after adverse climatic conditions may have returned to benign levels. One of the characteristics of acidification is that while it can be initiated by high CO2 levels over relatively short periods, there are no short-term geochemical fixes to reverse the process. Reversal can take place only through the immensely slow weathering and dissolution processes of geological time, processes that take hundreds of thousands to millions of years…

“The greenhouse gases we produce today will take a number of decades (and sometimes more) to unleash their full fury, but their effects are unavoidable and unstoppable. We cannot afford to wait until the predictions of science can be totally verified, because by that time it will be too late. How many of us wish to explain to our children and children’s children that the predictions were there but we wanted confirmation?... Reefs are the ocean’s canaries and we must hear their call. This call is not just for themselves, for the other great ecosystems of the ocean stand behind reefs like a row of dominoes. If coral reefs fail, the rest will follow in rapid succession, and the Sixth Mass Extinction will be upon us -- and will be of our making.”