A decade ago, the world experienced its third global coral bleaching event — and the vibrant, colorful corals along the western coast of Hawai‘i’s big island began to fade. Rising sea temperatures drove these famed corals to “bleach,” a process that strips them of color following the expulsion of a nutrient-producing algae called zooxanthellae. Without this vital algae, corals essentially starve. In 2015, researchers surveyed 14,000 coral colonies across the South Kohala and North Kona regions of West Hawai‘i and found that 38-92% of the reefs had been partially or fully bleached. Many ended up dying. “These aren’t little corals dying; these are really big, the size of Volkswagens, that have died,” ecologist Greg Asner, director of Arizona University’s Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science and a longtime Hawai‘i resident, told Mongabay in an interview. “It’s brutal to see, it’s visually arresting.” For Asner, this bleaching event in Hawai‘i was a turning point, not only for the health of the reefs, but for his work. “It changed my career,” he said. “I had been doing a lot more with tropical forests … but with that 2015 event, I said, ‘We got to do way more on reefs.’” Asner stayed true to his intention. In 2018, he and his team began using the Global Airborne Observatory, an airborne laboratory that Asner help equip with advanced mapping technologies such as lasers and infrared imaging technologies to survey coral colonies in the Caribbean and Hawai‘i to assess their health and understand what…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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