Tag: Caribbean

Can the circular economy help the Caribbean win its war against waste? – Mongabay

On the way to the Playa Quehueche in Livingston, on the Caribbean coast of Guatemala (by Ken MacElwee CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED via Flickr).

For decades, a graveyard of corroding barrels has littered the seafloor just off the coast of Los Angeles. It was out of sight, out of mind — a not-so-secret secret that haunted the marine environment until a team of researchers came across them with an advanced underwater camera…Startling amounts of DDT near the barrels pointed to a little-known history of toxic pollution…but federal regulators recently determined that the manufacturer had not bothered with barrels. (Its acid waste was poured straight into the ocean instead.)…

Great Barrier Reef’s worst bleaching leaves giant coral graveyard: ‘It looks as if it has been carpet bombed’ – the Guardian

One Tree Island, Great Barrier Reef: the majority of corals have died and among the few survivors, many are now bleached. In the foreground are two small bleached Galaxea colonies and an unbleached Montipora - May 1, 2024 (by John Turnbull CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED via Flickr).

Last month the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority released a report warning that the reef was experiencing “the highest levels of thermal stress on record”. The authority’s chief scientist, Dr Roger Beeden, spoke of extensive and uniform bleaching across the southern reefs, which had dodged the worst of much of the previous four mass bleaching events to blight the Great Barrier Reef since 2016…

Corals are bleaching in every corner of the ocean, threatening its web of life – the Washington Post

Bleached plate corals and Sea Fans on Molasses Reef, Key Largo, Florida (by Matt Kieffer CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED via Flickr).

First around Fiji, then the Florida Keys, then Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and now in the Indian Ocean. In the past year, anomalous ocean temperatures have left a trail of devastation for the world’s corals, bleaching entire reefs and threatening widespread coral mortality — and now, scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and International Coral Reef Initiative say the world is experiencing its fourth global bleaching event, the second in the last decade…

Six Months After the Heat Spiked, Caribbean Corals Are Still Reeling – Hakai Magazine

Staghorn Coral (Acropora cervicornis) in Bonaire, Caribbean Neatherlands, taken on January 21, 2024 (by Tom Murray CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED via Flickr).

For many Caribbean corals, last year’s heat proved too much to bear. The more time corals spend in hot water, the more likely they are to bleach, turning white as they expel the single-celled algae that live within their tissues. Without these symbiotic algae—and the energy they provide through photosynthesis—bleached corals starve. Survival becomes a struggle, and what had been a healthy thicket of colorful coral can turn into a tangle of skeletons…

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