Tag: coral reefs

If BP, along with the ‘Best and the Brightest’ can’t manage to turn off the spigot … The Florida Coral Reefs may be Next

Group Records Florida Coastal Environment Before Oil Arrives

Creighton Team Helps Oil Spill Study

MSNBC June 3, 2010

A research team from Creighton University is gathering data along Florida’s Gulf Coast and trying to stay ahead of the oil spill.

The team’s leader, John Schalles, said recovery crews aren’t the only ones scrambling against the resulting environmental disaster.

Creighton Professor John Schalles on the Oil Spill

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

 

We are killing the world’s coral reefs and their situation is virtually hopeless.

“The future is horrific,” says Charlie Veron, an Australian marine biologist who is widely regarded as the world’s foremost expert on coral reefs.

“There is no hope of reefs surviving to even mid-century in any form that we now recognise. If, and when, they go, they will take with them about one-third of the world’s marine biodiversity. Then there is a domino effect, as reefs fail so will other ecosystems. This is the path of a mass extinction event, when most life, especially tropical marine life, goes extinct.”

Or, as David Adam explains in his Guardian article about Why coral reefs face a catastrophic future:

Within just a few decades, experts are warning, the tropical reefs strung around the middle of our planet like a jewelled corset will reduce to rubble. Giant piles of slime-covered rubbish will litter the sea bed and spell in large distressing letters for the rest of foreseeable time: Humans Were Here.

They are not alone in their bleak outlook for the future of the world’s coral reefs.