Great Barrier Reef Impact

The Great Barrier Reef is a site of remarkable aquatic life and is located in the Coral Sea off the coast of Queensland, Australia. Made up of nearly 2,900 individual reefs, 600 continental islands and 300 coral cays, it’s the world’s largest single structure comprised of living organisms. If the Great Barrier Reef is looked at primarily by species diversity, then it can be classified as one of the most diverse habitats on the entire planet. Close to 9,000 species of marine life live in the GBR and have existed there for millions of years. (Bellwood, 2016) This can be detrimental to the entire ecosystem if the Great Barrier Reef reaches it tipping point due to the negative impact that human activity has on it. Many organisms and humans depend

Most of the past century’s warming is due to humans releasing heat-trapping gases, also known as greenhouse gases, into the atmosphere. One of the major emitted greenhouse gases is carbon dioxide (CO2) and it has considerably increased since the industrial revolution began. Greenhouse gases can be released in a variety of ways, such as the burning of fossil fuels, gasoline, or deforestation. Rising carbon dioxide has driven an increase in the ocean’s temperature which can lead to many different factors that place a stress on coral reefs, such as coral bleaching, sea level rise, or ocean acidification. Coral reef ecosystems are one of the most sensitive ecosystems to climate change (“United States Coral Reef Task Force”, 1999). Zooxanthellae is a symbiotic algae that lives in the coral’s tissue and when water temperatures get too hot, the algae begin to photosynthesize at a faster rate. The byproducts from this process put a strain on the corals. Thereby, the corals drive out the algae and begin to turn white because the algae are the reason why corals have color. This is called coral “bleaching” (Shazer, Liz). In addition, warmer waters slow down the process of coral calcification. Once carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere, the ocean absorbs it and produces carbonic acid by combining it with water.

According to Roz Pidcock, it wasn’t possible to measure the aragonite saturation for every reef in the Great Barrier ecosystem, however, scientists took a new approach and “took existing measurements at 22 sites around the inner Great Barrier Reef and combined them with a very fine-scale model of the surrounding water properties.” By doing this, they were able to focus in on individual reefs for the very first time. The results of the study show that not all coral reefs are in the same health to begin with and that in some regions, the aragonite saturation levels are already remarkably low. (Pidcock, Roz,