Warming danger over Oz reef

The Times of India , Saturday, February 03, 2007
Correspondent : Staff Reporter
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.

 
SOURCE : The Times of India, Saturday, February 03, 2007
 


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