The southern section of the Great Barrier Reef is undergoing extensive coral bleaching, according to researchers who recently surveyed the region. The discovery has raised fears that this fragile coral reef system is on the brink of a seventh mass bleaching event since 1998. In late February, scientists from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), a tropical marine research center in Townsville, Queensland, and staff from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (also known as the Reef Authority), the federal agency that manages the reef, conducted a series of helicopter surveys to assess the health of dozens of reefs along the southern region of the Great Barrier Reef. The surveyed reefs included 27 inshore reefs of the Keppel Islands and the Gladstone region and 27 offshore reefs in what’s known as the Capricorn Bunker group. The Reef Authority reported that coral bleaching was “extensive and fairly uniform” across all surveyed reefs and aligned with observations of accumulated heat stress. “In the reef communities surveyed most coral cover displayed some level of bleaching with white and fluorescent colonies observed in shallow reef areas,” Mark Read, the director of reef health at the Reef Authority, said in a statement. Coral bleaching at the Keppel Islands on the Great Barrier Reef. Image by TropWATER / Twitter. Neal Cantin, a senior research scientist at AIMS, said the team also observed “limited bleaching” further north, affecting coral reefs above the city of Mackay and even into the Whitsunday Islands, during additional surveys. Cantin…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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