Essay On Coral Reef

Throughout history, humans have been influenced by the ocean both directly and indirectly. We depend on the Ocean for many reasons; the air we breathe, the food on our plate, the items in our medicine cabinets and jobs and the economy. The ocean is something that we as humans take advantage of and don’t take the responsibility of caring for it. By doing this we are damaging beautiful and thriving ecosystems and killing the world as a whole that will affect how we live in the future. Most people don’t even have the knowledge of what is happening around them and the opportunities there are to help.

What Is Happening? As greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trap more energy from the sun which causes the oceans to absorb more heat. This is resulting

All these extra hydrogen ions increase the acidity of the ocean and make survival harder for planktonic organisms that depend on calcium carbonate to form their shells. A decrease in the base of the food chain will be destructive to the ecosystems to which they belong. As a result this will have a devastating effect on the oceans natural chemistry.

Coral Reefs

An article made out to National Geographic News by Sean Markey stated the following. Eight years after warming seas caused the worst coral die-off on record, coral reefs in the Indian Ocean are still unable to recover, biologists say.

Many reefs have been reduced to rubble, a collapse that has deprived fish of food and shelter. As a result, fish diversity has tumbled by half in some areas, say authors of the first long-term study of the effects of warming-caused bleaching on coral reefs and fish. The study focused on reefs near Africa's Seychelles islands, north of Madagascar (figure 2.1) which sustained heavy losses from bleaching in 1998. "The outlook for recovery is quite bleak for the Seychelles," said lead study author Nicholas Graham, a tropical marine biologist at England's University of Newcastle Upon Tyne. The study, in today's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, predicts that isolated reef ecosystems like that around the Seychelles will suffer the most from global

"By and large, reefs have collapsed catastrophically just in the three decades that I've been studying them," said Nancy Knowlton, a marine biology professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. Knowlton, who is also a member of National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration, notes that corals live precariously close to their thermal limits. As a result, even the most isolated reefs are vulnerable to the effects of global warming. "These increasingly warm temperatures that we've been seeing in the last couple of decades have been tipping reefs over in terms of these fast bleaching events," she said. Graham, the study author, says that while local and regional resource managers can mitigate some damage to coral reefs, broader action is required. "Bleaching is a global issue, and it's driven by global warming," Graham said. "So the onus is on all of us, really.” "We need to reduce greenhouse gases and take these issues