Graveyards of bleached coral skeletons are now left where once vibrant and species-rich ecosystems thrived. Global warming, as well as dynamite fishing and pollution, wiped out a startling 14 percent of the world's coral reefs between 20, according to the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network. The impacts of coral loss are dire: They cover only 0.2 percent of the ocean floor, but are home to at least a quarter of all marine animals and plants, helping sustain livelihoods for half 1 billion people worldwide. "There's very strong evidence to suggest that this reef is humanity's hope for having a coral reef ecosystem in the future," Hanafy said.Įslam Osman from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia said, "It is crucial that we preserve the northern Red Sea as one of the last standing coral refuges, because it could be a seed bank for any future restoration effort." Scientists hope that at least some of the Red Sea corals - 5 percent of the total corals left worldwide - could cling on amid what is otherwise a looming global collapse. That threatens a devastating loss for the hundreds of millions of people worldwide who depend on the fish stocks that live and breed in these fragile ecosystems.Įven if global warming is capped within Paris climate goals of 1.5 C above preindustrial levels, 99 percent of the world's corals would be unable to recover, experts say.īut Red Sea coral reefs, unlike those elsewhere, have proven "highly tolerant to rising sea temperatures," said Mahmoud Hanafy, professor of marine biology at Egypt's Suez Canal University. Most shallow water corals, battered and bleached white by repeated marine heat waves, are "unlikely to last the century," the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in 2022. Photo: AFPBeneath the waters off Egypt's Red Sea coast, a kaleidoscopic ecosystem teems with life that could become the world's "last coral refuge" as global heating eradicates reefs elsewhere, researchers say. Fish swim by coral reefs off the dive spot of Abu Dabbab along Egypt's southern Red Sea coast north of Marsa Alam on September 17, 2022.
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