For the third time in recorded history, a massive coral bleaching event is unfolding throughout the world’s oceans, stretching from Hawaii to the Indian Ocean.
A group of ocean scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed this bleaching event is being brought on by a combination of a strong El Niño pattern, a warm water mass in the Pacific called “the Blob,” and increasingly warming ocean temperatures brought on by climate change.
This potentially lethal mixture of elements is expected to impact about 38 percent of the world’s coral reefs by the end of this year and kill over 4,633 square miles of reefs. NOAA predicts that by the end of 2015, almost 95 percent of U.S. coral reefs will have been exposed to ocean conditions that can cause corals to bleach.
“This is already an unusually long time” for a coral bleaching event to be going on, said Mark Eakin, NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch coordinator. “And El Niño is expected to continue well in to next year, so it is expected to that this will start all over again in 2016 and may get worse.”
A World Wild Life study released last month predicted losing all coral reefs by 2050 due to warming oceans and ocean acidification. Coral reef ecosystems make up only 0.1 percent of ocean area, but nearly a quarter of all marine species depend on them to survive and rely on their habitat.
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