Weeping. Grieving. Heartsick..........
We humans must wake up! - Molly
Climate change and ocean acidification have killed off one of the most spectacular features on the planet.
The
Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long
illness. It was 25 million years old.
For
most of its life, the reef was the world’s largest living structure, and the
only one visible from space. It was 1,400 miles long, with 2,900 individual
reefs and 1,050 islands. In total area, it was larger than the United Kingdom,
and it contained more biodiversity than all of Europe combined. It harbored
1,625 species of fish, 3,000 species of mollusk, 450 species of coral, 220
species of birds, and 30 species of whales and dolphins. Among its many other
achievements, the reef was home to one of the world’s largest populations of
dugong and the largest breeding ground of green turtles.
The
reef was born on the eastern coast of the continent of Australia during the
Miocene epoch. Its first 24.99 million years were seemingly happy ones, marked
by overall growth. It was formed by corals, which are tiny anemone-like animals
that secrete shell to form colonies of millions of individuals. Its
complex, sheltered structure came to comprise the most important habitat in the
ocean. As sea levels rose and fell through the ages, the reef built itself into
a vast labyrinth of shallow-water reefs and atolls extending 140 miles off the
Australian coast and ending in an outer wall that plunged half a mile into the
abyss. With such extraordinary diversity of life and landscape, it provided
some of the most thrilling marine adventures on earth to humans who visited.
Its otherworldly colors and patterns will be sorely missed.
To
say the reef was an extremely active member of its community is an
understatement. The surrounding ecological community wouldn’t have existed
without it. Its generous spirit was immediately evident 60,000 years ago, when
the first humans reached Australia from Asia during a time of much lower sea
levels. At that time, the upper portions of the reef comprised limestone cliffs
and innumerable caves lining a resource-rich coast. Charlie Veron, longtime
chief scientist for the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the Great
Barrier Reef’s most passionate champion (he personally discovered 20
percent of the world’s coral species), called the reef in that era a “Stone Age
Utopia.” Aboriginal clans hunted and fished its waters and cays for millennia,
and continued to do so right up to its demise.
Worldwide
fame touched the reef in 1770, when Captain James Cook became the first
European to navigate its deadly maze. Although the reef was beloved by nearly
all who knew it, Cook was not a fan. “The sea in all parts conceals shoals that
suddenly project from the shore, and rocks that rise abruptly like a pyramid
from the bottom,” he wrote in his journal. Cook’s ship foundered on
one of those shoals and was nearly sunk, but after several months Cook escaped
the reef.
After
that, the reef was rarely out of the spotlight. A beacon for explorers, scientists,
artists, and tourists, it became Australia’s crown jewel. Yet that didn’t stop
the Queensland government from attempting to lease nearly the entire reef to
oil and mining companies in the 1960s—a move that gave birth to Australia’s
first conservation movement and a decade-long “Save the Reef” campaign that
culminated in the 1975 creation of Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, which
restricted fishing, shipping, and development in the reef and seemed to ensure
its survival. In his 2008 book, A Reef in Time, Veron wrote that back then he might have
ended his book about the reef with “a heartwarming bromide: ‘And now we can
rest assured that future generations will treasure this great wilderness area
for all time.’” But, he continued: “Today, as we are coming to grips with the
influence that humans are having on the world’s environments, it will come as
no surprise that I am unable to write anything remotely like that ending.”
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