Calling it the most extensive review of how coral on Australia's Great Barrier Reef is faring, scientists on Monday reported some alarming news: The amount of coral covering reefs there has been cut in half since 1985 and will likely continue to decline unless steps are taken to at least attack the easiest of several factors.
"We show a major decline in coral cover from 28 percent to 13.8 percent" of the entire system, the experts wrote after reviewing 2,258 surveys of 214 reefs within the marine sanctuary.
"Two-thirds of that decline has occurred since 1998," they added.
John Bruno, a coral expert who was not part of the study, called the findings "really grim" and reflecting loss even higher than deforestation in the tropics, a topic that generally gets much more attention. "In 2007, we first sounded the alarm that the Great Barrier Reef, and Pacific reefs in general, were not as pristine and resilient as a lot of people wanted to believe," Bruno, a marine biology professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, told NBC News. "But still, this is really shocking to me."
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