See full version: How to be a reef-safe traveler
It’s no secret that the world’s coral reefs are in serious trouble, their prospects threatened by everything from climate change to overfishing; in fact, scientists predict that without drastic action nearly all of these dazzling ecosystems could be gone by 2050.
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A growing number of conservation foundations, national parks, and eco-friendly hotels worldwide run citizen scientist programs that allow everyday travelers to play an active role in contributing to the long-term protection of the world’s coral reefs. more
Dr. Daniel Harrison, Southern Cross University Senior Lecturer and project leader, said that cloud brightening was one of the most promising potential methods that could protect very large areas of reefs. more
Researchers set out to the sea with two boats; one was a ferry that carried the jet engine-looking turbine that is the prototype cloud brightening machine with its equipment, including accommodations for the team members, and the other boat was fitted out with an air sampling equipment that was used to check if the project was working. A total of 320 nozzles sprayed a nano-droplet flume into the sky off the back of the boat while the team monitored the process using the drones and the sensors aboard the second boat. [links]
In the video footage of the project's trial run, Harrison says "Cloud brightening concept is where we take seawater, atomize it, which is sprayed out of the turbine (on the ship). Then those droplets will mix up with the atmospheric layer and brighten the clouds a little bit," about the project. If all goes according to plan, this process could buy the endangered marine life a couple of decades. What's more, the process uses no chemicals and relies solely on natural processes. here
Harrison explained in the press release: “Microscopic seawater droplets are sprayed into the air, evaporating leaving just nano-sized sea salt crystals which act as seeds for cloud droplets, brightening existing cloud and deflecting solar energy away from the reef waters when heat stress is at its maximum." more
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has declined by 50% since 1985, due to storm damage, coral bleaching and waves of crown-of-thorns starfish suffocating the coral. [links]
They also absorb and store harmful pollutants, such as carbon, in the same way trees remove CO2 emissions from the atmosphere. This process regulates carbon levels in the waters around reef systems, providing an environment for microorganisms to thrive. more
Warming ocean waters prevent corals laying down their calcium carbonate skeleton, which inhibits the growth essential for a healthy reef ecosystem. [links]
Their loss would be devastating for the planet, as well as for the communities that rely on coral reefs for employment and tourism.
Tackling the grave threats to our ocean means working with leaders across sectors, from business to government to academia. more
Keith Fern, writer Juli Berwald, and Ben Fern underwater at Stetson Bank on June 15, 2021. Photograph by Ben Lowy
Until the mid-twentieth century, scientists didn’t take the claims of coral reefs in the deep Gulf seriously, but Tom Pulley, director emeritus of the Houston Museum of Natural Science, believed the fishermen’s stories. In 1960 he asked the Navy to loan him a destroyer headquartered in New Orleans. He assembled a team of divers who, in those days before neoprene and silicone, geared up in khaki pants and Speedo-style swimming trunks. During their descent to the tops of the salt domes, they dodged barracuda and sharks. On the way up, they carried more than a thousand pounds of living coral and sponges. One of those divers, photographer Robert Woods, participated in another big expedition at the site seven years later, this time bringing back photographs of fire and brain coral, of grouper and butterfly fish. There was a coral reef in Texas, and it was very much alive. more
In the early 1900s, snapper and grouper fishermen looked down from the decks of their boats into that sky-blue water, where it wasn’t hard to see the colorful tops of salt domes. They named the spot “Texas Flower Gardens” for its vibrant floral appearance and returned to shore with reports that bits of coral were often entangled in their nets. Skeptics, however, thought the specimens were fossils. more
Petroleum geologists were attracted to salt domes as places to drill for oil. When a diapir pushes through the overlying layers of sediment, those layers deform. Hydrocarbons, which are lighter than the surrounding briny water, migrate upward. They continue rising until they are hemmed in by something impermeable, like a balloon hitting the ceiling. In the Gulf, that ceiling—or, to use the technical homonym, the sealing—is frequently salt. Oil and gas reservoirs often abut a salt dome. here
On salt domes too deep for reef-building coral, Bright discovered that enough light filtered down for another kind of photosynthetic life. Called coralline algae, they look like the olive and copper lichens covering granite walls throughout the Texas Hill Country, but in colors of carnation pink and eggplant purple. “Not only do they encrust the existing reef rock and bind it all together,” Bright said, “they form these algal nodules that are scattered about almost all these banks down to about two hundred and fifty feet.” These nodules build the architecture for a bustling suburbia surrounding the coral cities. “The diversity on these algal nodule terraces may be equally high or possibly higher than on the coral reefs in terms of number of species of animals,” he added. “That’s where a lot of the action is.” more
The first time I heard of Flower Garden Banks—years ago, when I was an ocean scientist—it sounded like a Texas-size tale: a collection of seamounts rich in coral, rising from waters hundreds of feet deep, about a hundred miles southeast of Galveston. Not a flimsy, raggedy reef, but one bursting with life. A spectacular dive site with waters as crystalline as those at the most sought-out locations in the world, like the Indo-Pacific’s Coral Triangle or Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, with visibility that stretched a hundred feet or more. A place where behemoths roamed: all those manta rays and whale sharks, as well as giant grouper like the ones you might see in faded photos on the walls of tackle shops, and schools of hammerhead and blacktip sharks. All of this just a few hours off the Texas coast. The story seemed preposterous.