Coral growth in decline at Great Barrier Reef
Warming, more acidic oceans cited; ‘pretty scary’ findings, one expert says By Miguel Llanos, msnbc.com These massive porites corals at the Great Barrier Reef are hundreds of years old. The corals are like trees in that each year a new band is laid down in their skeletons that record their environmental histories (Jurgen Freund / Freund Factory). The rate at which corals absorb calcium from seawater to calcify their hard skeletons — and thus grow — has declined dramatically in the last two decades and signs point to manmade greenhouse gas emissions as the culprit, according to a study of samples from Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Researchers with the Australian Institute of Marine Science looked at the skeletal records of porites corals collected over the years at 69 reefs along the 1,600-mile-long Great Barrier Reef. Those corals, some 400 years old, showed that calcification declined by 13 percent between 1990 and 2005. "The data suggest that such a severe and sudden decline in calcification is unprecedented in at least the past 400 years," the researchers stated in the study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Science. A reef expert not involved in the study described it as "very important." In a commentary posted on newsvine.com for msnbc.com, John Bruno added that "the findings are frankly pretty scary."

Coral growth in decline at Great Barrier Reef