Canberra: Australia's Great Barrier Reef's vastness and wave-smashing outcrops mask fragility in the face of climate change threatening to bleach its fluorescent depths the stark white of death.
The reef, and possibly the A$5.8 billion ($4.5 billion) tourist industry it underpins, will be "functionally extinct" by 2050, a draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned this week.
"Climate change is clearly a threat to the corals and the tiny plants that live in the tissues, but the issues go far beyond coral.
Corals build a structure in which thousands of species live," Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a coral bleaching researcher said. Coral bleaching due to rising temperatures has struck many reefs around the world, hitting the Indian Ocean, parts of the Caribbean and Australia.