Scientists: Major coral bleaching crisis spreads worldwide

“It’s certainly on that road to a point about 2030 when every year is a bleaching year …”

A before and after image of the bleaching in American Samoa. After it is expelled, the bright, white skeleton of the coral is left exposed.

The current event follows bleaching in 2014 that widely affected reefs in the main Hawaiian Islands.

This fire coral in Bermuda bleached as Atlantic waters warmed in recent months. That’s not as bad as the loss in 1998, but there’s a fear that if the event continues into 2016, the losses would grow.

The scientists worked with the National Ocean Atmospheric Administration on the project exploring how the El Nino weather pattern will impact on coral reefs.

And a staccato of scientific studies have predicted continual decline of corals as warming ticks upward, one of them led by Hoegh-Guldberg in 2007. “It’s a doozy of an event”.

“Thankfully the Great Barrier Reef was spared during this second global event (in 2010) due to storm activity which alleviated the heat stress”. Approximately, 60% of those coral reefs are expected to be “hit with severe thermal stress causing death of those corals”, says Eakin.

The current event began in 2014 in parts of the Pacific – including the Hawaiian Islands, which experienced mass coral bleaching around multiple islands.

Dr Tyrone Ridgway, from UQ’s Global Change Institute, said the severity of any impact on Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef will depend on how long the higher-than-average ocean temperatures last.

He said while the first signs of coral bleaching on the reef occurred from 1980 onwards, 1998 was the first truly global event – affecting half of coral reefs in the GBR alone.

This map shows areas at highest risk of bleaching from now until January 2016. Add to that Hawaii’s “blob”, a pool of warm water that has stagnated in the northeast Pacific.

Alice Lawrence, a marine biologist, assesses the bleaching at Airport Reef in American Samoa.

NOAA models suggest that by mid-2016, the bleaching will have spread even further through most of the world’s coral-bearing regions, extending across almost all of the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific.

Eakin says there is the potential for considerable bleaching in the eastern Pacific as well as the central and southern Pacific, given the mild water temperatures there related to El Niño.

A privately funded venture, the XL Catlin Seaview Survey, has been mapping reefs in 26 countries since 2012.

The rapid response team from the University of Queensland and the Catlin Seaview Survey use a camera system attached to an underwater scooter to document their findings. The Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, an worldwide government-based initiative, was reorganized in 2008 and shifted from gathering data on reefs to preparing reports on the basis of data from others.

“You kill coral, you destroy reefs, you don’t have a place for the fish to live, ” Eakin said.

A few scientists are warning that spectacular reefs as we know them – with branching corals and fan corals – are unlikely to survive changes in temperature and pH by the end of this century.

It narrowly avoided being put on the UN World Heritage in danger list this year with Canberra now working on a plan to improve the reef’s health over successive decades.

The first globally observed coral bleaching event occurred in 1998, during the last very strong El Nino event – when it happened, scientists had never seen anything like it.

Coral reefs comprise less than.