Diving The GBR: Water Thick With The Stench Of Death, Coral Tissues Dripping Off Reef Formations

[hatrack]

It was the smell that really got to diver Richard Vevers. The smell of death on the reef. “I can’t even tell you how bad I smelt after the dive – the smell of millions of rotting animals.”

Vevers is a former advertising executive and is now the chief executive of the Ocean Agency, a not-for-profit company he founded to raise awareness of environmental problems. After diving for 30 years in his spare time, he was compelled to combine his work and hobby when he was struck by the calamities faced by oceans around the world. Chief among them was coral bleaching, caused by climate change.

His job these days is rather morbid. He travels the world documenting dead and dying coral reefs, sometimes gathering photographs just ahead of their death, too. With the world now in the midst of the longest and probably worst global coral bleaching event in history, it’s boom time for Vevers. Even with all that experience, he’d never seen anything like the devastation he saw last month around Lizard Island in the northern third of Australia’s spectacular Great Barrier Reef.

As part of a project documenting the global bleaching event, he had surveyed Lizard Island, which sits about 90km north of Cooktown in far north Queensland, when it was in full glorious health; then just as it started bleaching this year; then finally a few weeks after the bleaching began. “It was one of the most disgusting sights I’ve ever seen,” he says. “The hard corals were dead and covered in algae, looking like they’ve been dead for years. The soft corals were still dying and the flesh of the animals was decomposing and dripping off the reef structure.” It’s the sort of description that would be hard to believe, if it wasn’t captured in photographs. In images shared exclusively with the Guardian, the catastrophic nature of the current mass bleaching event on previously pristine parts of the Great Barrier Reef can now be revealed.

EDIT

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/07/the-great-barrier-reef-a-catastrophe-laid-bare

[Dustlawyer]

1. First Climate Change came for the reefs, but I wasn't a diver;

Next it extended itself into severe droughts. It's been blamed as the root cause of the problems in Syria. The farmers had to give up and moved to the cities. No work or bread and boom goes the dynamite!!! But I wasn't a farmer;
Then, at the same time it affected the many crops from California, many of which are water intensive, like almonds;
It dried up lakes and aquifers, no snow pack because no snow. Don't ski, allergic to almonds;
Air conditioners running all day and into the night. Damn, that one sucks!

Climate Change is attacking us and we continue to feed it. The corporations world-wide are lying their asses off. They are paying our politicians to lie to us. They are using their media to ignore it, and of course lie to us. On top of all of that, no one wants the sacrifice involved in switching over on short notice, which is what is needed if we intend to stop Climate Change before it creates a feedback loop. When that happens, the thaw over a butt load of previously trapped Methane will keep the warming moving up even if we stop everything that pollutes.

We messed with stuff before we understood it. Now we are hooked on energy! We use it to power our society and must develop lower energy machines and alternative energy sources. We must change our transportation system. Really entrenched industries!

But the first thing we must do is to educate everyone, teach it in schools. We must gain the seats of power to make anything real happen. That's what Bernie will help us do no matter what. Like he says, "It's too important not to!"