Parts of Great Barrier Reef show highest coral cover seen in 36 years | Hacker News Reader

Parts of Great Barrier Reef show highest coral cover seen in 36 years

aims.gov.au

This can probably be merged with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32348567

I'm not seeing any mention of the drastically lower tourism for 2020/21 due to Covid. Is there any hypothesis for how this might effect things? Sunscreen? Boat emissions? They mention the tourism drives a ton of dollars, but it also has to drive a ton of contaminants.

Does anyone see any explanation beyond just weather?

Environmentalism ends up in such a catch-22. Of course you want to acknowledge that environmental efforts actually work, but, I think there is also a fear that if there is acknowledgement that things are improving, society will immediately revert to the behaviors that caused the problem in the first place, or worse.

This content seems very hopeful to me. So long was we refrain from adding "acute stress" to the reef, there is a chance that it can recover over the years.

Or at the very least, donations and public funding for “environmental efforts” may decrease. Not good for those who get their income from those “efforts”.

> Above-average water temperatures led to a mass coral bleaching event over the austral summer of 2021/22, the fourth event since 2016 and the first recorded during a La Niña year.

I wonder how significant this is - coral bleaching during a La Niña year.

Sure, if the Australian government says so than it must be true..

Acropora is the keyword here

Right - coral diversity is still way down, and the reef health as an ecosystem whole is still the worse for it.

its fast growing coral which is great but fast growing also means fast dieing. You need bio-diveristy in a reef

The way I read it, this is more of "some things seem to be going from bad to less bad" rather than "everything is fine". There's still many warning signs, and there's nothing suggesting the problems with the GBR is somehow solved.

>> There's still many warning signs, and there's nothing suggesting the problems with the GBR is somehow solved.

From the article:

>> On the Central and Northern GBR, region-wide hard coral cover reached 33% and 36%, respectively; the highest level recorded in the past 36 years of monitoring.

I'm not sure what problems you're referring to. What I'm getting from the article is that there are good and bad years for the reef, and at present there is no evidence of long term decline or some kind of permanent destruction.

This should be last year of La Nina, so should i guess continued recovery for next 2 years of El Nino.

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