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Earth Science

Increasingly Frequent Marine Heatwaves Can Kill Coral Almost Instantly, Study Finds (bbc.com) 37

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Increasingly frequent marine heatwaves can lead to the almost instant death of corals, scientists working on the Great Barrier Reef have found. These episodes of unusually high water temperatures are -- like heatwaves on land -- associated with climate change. Scientists studying coral after a heat event discovered that extreme temperature rises decayed reefs much more rapidly than previously thought. The study revealed that corals became up to 15% weaker after an extreme heat event, causing some fragments to actually break off from the reef. The study has been published in the journal Current Biology.
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Increasingly Frequent Marine Heatwaves Can Kill Coral Almost Instantly, Study Finds

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  • Time to face facts (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Barny ( 103770 ) on Friday August 09, 2019 @11:10PM (#59073000) Journal

    We have wiped out coral and all the things that rely on it. This shit's only going to get worse, and it was in a fine balance already.

    Add it to the list and move on.

    • by reanjr ( 588767 )

      Or we're engineering a rare species of super coral. It could go either way.

      I bet in the future, all animals larger than a hamster will have evolved to be friendly and adorable, or low maintenance and delicious.

      The anthropocene is going to be great!

      • by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Saturday August 10, 2019 @12:03AM (#59073050)

        Or we're engineering a rare species of super coral.

        Many, many Moons ago, a friend from Australia told me that the biggest threat to coral was tourists who got out of boats and trampled around on it.

        He speculated that coral could evolve to develop "huge pointy teeth" to bite the tourist's feet.

        That would solve everything.

        Now, if coral would evolve into a creature that could walk up on shore, and attack, Godzilla style, coal power plants . . . we would all have something amusing to watch on television.

      • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        You left out they will all be extinct and we'll be eating some friendly low maintenance reformed algae sludge.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Pretty easy to tell by coral polyps reproduction method, their destruction is pretty normal as is their spread and regrowth. The formation depopulated when conditions bad, repopulated in one season when conditions could. That coral life is the skin on top, not the dead skeletons of what has gone before.

      Man made climate change, affects us far more, due to our cities and infrastructure, than it does the rest, the come, they go, change locations evolve, our society collapses and most of us die, kind of stupid

    • but it requires 6 infinity stones and a really big glove.
      • but it requires 6 infinity stones and a really big glove.

        Or dialing up the fear so high we get people so depressed they kill themselves, or cranked up with so much anger and anxiety that they go on a murder spree.

        Hey! Assholes! Stop with the fear mongering! We get it. How about instead of cranking up the fear to the point it's driving people insane we come up with some solutions that don't involve killing people?

        I have an idea. Let's get our electricity from a mix of onshore wind, hydro, nuclear, and some natural gas to ease that transition. For transportatio

    • While I was filling the gas tank of my SUV.

    • The fact we need to face is that the Cretaceous period was much hotter than it is now, but somehow everything didn't die.

      • There were no ice sheets in the Cretaceous, and whole groups of mammals died out. Tell us again how we should welcome a return to the late Cretaceous.

        • During the last ice age, there were massive ice sheets and whole groups of mammals died out. How is that much different?
          • It's different because it was hotter, and the current problem isn't cooling, it's warming.

            It's similar in that heating and cooling are both problems. What we want is relative stasis. We could conceivably survive significant warming, but we are neither preparing adequately for that eventuality, nor effectively avoiding it.

            • It's different because it was hotter, and the current problem isn't cooling, it's warming.

              It's similar in that heating and cooling are both problems. What we want is relative stasis. We could conceivably survive significant warming, but we are neither preparing adequately for that eventuality, nor effectively avoiding it.

              It's been hotter AND cooler in the past - and will be in the future, too... You want stasis? That's not the normal state of things - change is. And people tend to thrive when it's warmer rather than colder (witness the population around the tropics as compared to the polar regions). There is quite a bit of evidence that the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period were both as hot as it is now, and world-wide - and both were times when humanity made pretty big leaps forward in agriculture, culture

            • You seem to have missed the point that "whole groups of mammals dying out" is something that seems to happen independently of temperature.

      • "...The study revealed that corals became up to 15% weaker after an extreme heat event, causing some fragments to actually break off from the reef... -and burst into flame"

        This is one of the two keystones of the climate change ruse...
        They want you to believe that "any tiny change caused by humans might kill everything" yet they cannot explain how all the similar (and larger) changes in the past (when there was no humans to blame) didn't kill everything.

        Climate change is a pyramid scheme of myths. You
    • Have you seen the constant shitposting lately?

    • Because at some point after living with an sewer overflowing for years you eventually can't stand the smell and call a damn plumber.

      To be honest I'm not a fan of anonymous posts, at the very least even if you don't need to put a real name to your shitposting (because occasionally it isn't shit) at the very least there needs to be a minimum barrier to entry.

      • I am a fan of the anonymous posting. This ability to post anonymously was one reason I joined Slashdot, as contradictory that might seem.

        Some people want to just add to the discussion without the need to log in. For so long this has meant having to sort out the signal from the noise, and the signal to noise level was tolerable. I don't know what happened to make the noise overwhelm the signal recently. I will admit that it has got out of hand as every time I posted anything I saw the same comment as a r

  • https://www.accuweather.com/en... [accuweather.com]

    Yeah, what does the scientist that founded Accuweather know anyway?

  • Anyone else notice, in their scuba diving, that the images for the area always have such colorful reefs from pics? There's the expected tourism pamphlets, but even images in nearby museum-style informative places, showing the area 20 years ago. Then when you go down, it's mostly grey? That's my experience anyway. I've only been down 8 times, mostly the Caribbean.

    I guess the most likely reason is marketing decisions by the tourism wing of local government. But I have to suspect at least part of it is ju

    • No, it's because they are using color filters on their lens and also boosting the color on the pictures and video in post.

      Photos and videos I take when diving look just like the marketing stuff if I do some color grading in post.

  • There's the people mocking other for "clinging to their Bible and their guns". Well, what do you expect when we have a media that keeps trying to find ways to scare us out of our gourds?

    This "clingy" feeling isn't just for right wing nutjobs any more.
    https://www.studyfinds.org/stu... [studyfinds.org]

    Potential occurrences commonly worried about by preppers include possible economic depressions, terrorist attacks, cyber-attacks, pandemics, or environmental disasters.

    "Rather than seeing prepping as an exception within America's right-wing political culture, we ought to see it as being reflective of increasingly established and popular outlooks," Mills comments.

    We have a media that tells us that if we don't solve this global warming problem in the next 12 years then we will hit a point of runaway warming. We are told the government is out to kill all the people that are black and br

    • We have a media that tells us that if we don't solve this global warming problem in the next 12 years then we will hit a point of runaway warming. ... There's the people mocking other for "clinging to their Bible and their guns". Well, what do you expect...?

      We expect you to vote for someone who will do something about the problem, not pretend it's a hoax. We understand, and really don't care if you practice religion and safe self-defense. Heck, we vote for religious freedom for everyone, and nobody's trying to ban all guns. Where's your understanding of us? Why have you consistently voted against doing something about this huge problem that will affect us all? Instead, ultimately voting for the born-uber-rich draft-dodging city slicker that doesn't pay hi

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