Great Barrier Reef: Half of natural wonder is ‘dead or dying’ and it is on the brink of extinction, scientists say

The reef stretches 1,430 miles along Australia’s coast, making it the world’s largest living ecosystem

Andrew Griffin 

Half of the Great Barrier Reef is “dead or dying” and almost all of it is on the brink of extinction, scientists have warned in one of the bleakest assessments of the health of the world's biggest living ecosystem.

Climate change is leading the reef to undergo a “significant” event that threatens its existence, according to Australian ministers.

Only seven per cent of the reef has escaped “bleaching”, which happens when the water warms and leads the coral to expel the algae that lives inside of it, turning it white. If temperatures don’t drop, then the coral will not be able to recover and it will die.

The event is partly being caused by the strong El Nino weather system that has swept across the world in the last year. But global warming is the underlying cause, say scientists, and so the bleaching and death is likely to continue.

"We've never seen anything like this scale of bleaching before. In the northern Great Barrier Reef, it's like 10 cyclones have come ashore all at once," said Professor Terry Hughes, conveyor of the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce, which conducted aerial surveys of the World Heritage site.

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