By Julie Makinen13 July 2016 (Los Angeles Times) – China struck back loudly and forcefully Wednesday after an international tribunal invalidated many of its claims in the South China Sea. But Beijing has largely been silent about some of the tribunal’s most damning findings: that its activities there have “caused devastating and long-lasting damage to […]
8 July 2016 (University of Western Australia) – A team of marine scientists led by The University of Western Australia have uncovered the extinction of a kelp forest ecosystem along 100 kilometres of Western Australia’s coastline, following a heatwave that occurred in 2011. Kelp forests in Western Australia have not experienced a heatwave of this […]
[Many more to follow. –Des] 14 June 2016 (University of Queensland) – University of Queensland and Queensland Government researchers have confirmed that the Bramble Cay melomys (Melomys rubicola) – the only mammal species endemic to the Great Barrier Reef – is the first mammal to go extinct due to human-induced climate change. In a newly […]
By Chris Mooney 23 June 2016 (Washington Post) – Here at the Energy and Environment blog, we cover, regularly, the tipping points of climate change — how, for instance, the glaciers of West Antarctica may already have passed a key threshold that leads to unstoppable melt. We cover the history of the Earth’s climate — […]
By Michael Slezak6 June 2016 (Guardian) – It was the smell that really got to diver Richard Vevers. The smell of death on the reef. “I can’t even tell you how bad I smelt after the dive – the smell of millions of rotting animals.” Vevers is a former advertising executive and is now the […]
7 June 2016 (Guardian) – Richard Vevers from the Ocean Agency had never experienced anything like the devastation he witnessed in May diving around the dead and dying coral reefs off Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef. When his team emerged from the water, he says, ‘We realised we just stank – we stank […]
By Merrit Kennedy14 May 2016 (NPR) – The massive bleaching hitting the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia is likely that country’s “biggest ever environmental disaster,” says Dr. Justin Marshall, who has studied the reef for three decades. Only 7 percent of the reef has escaped bleaching, according to researchers at the ARC […]
By David Sigston10 May 2016 (AAP) – Scientists are worried about an “unprecedented” dieback of mangroves in northern Australia and the link with large-scale coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. The widespread damage to mangroves around the Gulf of Carpentaria has been highlighted at an international wetland conference held this week in Darwin. While […]
By Shreya Dasgupta11 May 2016 (mongabay.com) – Coral reefs around the world are in deep trouble. Last month, scientists reported that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef corals were experiencing “the worst mass bleaching event in its history”. Of the 500 coral reefs they observed while flying over 4,000 kilometers (~2,485 miles) of the Great Barrier Reef, […]
By Anthony Stewart6 May 2016 (ABC News) – Between 70 and 90 per cent of coral in the shallow water around Christmas Island are bleached due to rising ocean temperatures, researchers say. Over the past month, sea temperature around the island has jumped from the usually 28 degrees to above 31 degrees. It has pushed […]
