9A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, MARCH 15, 2017
Scientists race to prevent wipeout of world’s coral reefs
By ELENA BECATOROS
Associated Press
SOUTH ARI ATOLL,
Maldives — There were star-
tling colors here just a year
ago, a dazzling array of life
beneath the waves. Now this
Maldivian reef is dead, killed
by the stress of rising ocean
temperatures. What’s left is
a haunting expanse of gray, a
scene repeated in reefs across
the globe in what has fast
become a full-blown ecologi-
cal catastrophe.
The world has lost roughly
half its coral reefs in the last
30 years. Scientists are now
scrambling to ensure that at
least a fraction of these unique
ecosystems survives beyond
the next three decades. The
health of the planet depends
on it: Coral reefs support a
quarter of all marine species,
as well as half a billion people
around the world.
“This isn’t something that’s
going to happen 100 years
from now. We’re losing them
right now,” said marine biol-
ogist Julia Baum of Canada’s
University of Victoria. “We’re
losing them really quickly,
much more quickly than I
think any of us ever could
have imagined.”
Even if the world could halt
global warming now, scientists
still expect that more than 90
percent of corals will die by
2050. Without drastic inter-
vention, we risk losing them
all.
“To lose coral reefs is to
fundamentally undermine the
health of a very large propor-
tion of the human race,” said
Ruth Gates, director of the
Hawaii Institute of Marine
Biology.
Coral reefs produce some
of the oxygen we breathe.
Often described as underwa-
ter rainforests, they populate
a tiny fraction of the ocean
but provide habitats for one
in four marine species. Reefs
also form crucial barriers pro-
tecting coastlines from the full
force of storms.
They provide billions of
dollars in revenue from tour-
ism, fishing and other com-
merce, and are used in medical
research for cures to diseases
including cancer, arthritis and
bacterial or viral infections.
“Whether you’re living in
North America or Europe or
Australia, you should be con-
cerned,” said biologist Ove
Hoegh-Guldberg, director of
the Global Change Institute
at Australia’s University of
Queensland. “This is not just
some distant dive destination,
a holiday destination. This is
the fabric of the ecosystem
that supports us.”
And that fabric is being
torn apart.
“You couldn’t be more
dumb ... to erode the very
thing that life depends on —
the ecosystem — and hope
that you’ll get away with it,”
Hoegh-Guldberg said.
Corals are invertebrates,
living mostly in tropical
waters. They secrete calcium
carbonate to build protective
skeletons that grow and take
on impressive colors, thanks to
a symbiotic relationship with
algae that live in their tissues
and provide them with energy.
But corals are sensitive to
temperature fluctuations, and
are suffering from rising ocean
temperatures and acidification,
as well as from overfishing,
pollution, coastal development
and agricultural runoff.
A temperature change of
just 1 to 2 degrees Celsius (1.8
to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) can
force coral to expel the algae,
leaving their white skeletons
visible in a process known as
“bleaching.”
Bleached
coral
can
recover if the water cools,
but if high temperatures per-
sist for months, the coral will
die. Eventually the reef will
degrade, leaving fish without
habitats and coastlines less
protected from storm surges.
The first global bleaching
event occurred in 1998, when
16 percent of corals died.
The problem spiraled dra-
matically in 2015-2016 amid
an extended El Nino natu-
ral weather phenomenon that
warmed Pacific waters near
the equator and triggered the
most widespread bleaching
ever documented. This third
global bleaching event, as it is
known, continues today even
after El Nino ended.
Headlines have focused
on damage to Australia’s
famed Great Barrier Reef,
but other reefs have fared just
as badly or worse across the
world, from Japan to Hawaii
to Florida.
Around the islands of the
Maldives, an idyllic Indian
Ocean
tourism
destina-
tion, some 73 percent of sur-
veyed reefs suffered bleach-
ing between March and May
2016, according to the coun-
try’s Marine Research Center.
“This bleaching epi-
sode seems to have impacted
the entire Maldives, but the
severity of bleaching varies”
between reefs, according to
local conditions, said Nizam
Ibrahim, the center’s senior
research officer.
Worst hit have been areas in
the central Pacific, where the
University of Victoria’s Baum
has been conducting research
on Kiritimati, or Christmas
Island, in the Republic of
Kiribati. Warmer water tem-
peratures lasted there for 10
months in 2015-2016, killing
a staggering 90 percent of the
reef.
Fresh Starts: Program provides students with a sense of accomplishment
Continued from Page 1A
program, said she spoke sev-
eral years ago with Astoria
High School Principal Lynn
Jackson, who made a straight-
forward proposition.
“We needed a green-
house,” she said. “They
needed
an
educational
program.”
With help from Home
Depot’s volunteer arm Team
Depot, the district and the
master gardeners, the dilapi-
dated greenhouse was refur-
bished with new shelving,
storage and a planting table.
For the past several years,
master gardeners have come
in once a month between
September and May, teach-
ing students planting, cutting,
transplanting and other basic
gardening skills. The green-
house is part of the Youth
Transition Program, a state-
wide partnership to prepare
high school students with dis-
abilities for employment and
career-technical training, but
Danny Miller/The Daily Astorian
Students in the Fresh Starts program make hypertufa flower pots.
is open to anyone interested
in gardening.
Each year, the master gar-
deners work with students to
create hanging plants, sedum
wreaths and other horticul-
tural presents. In exchange,
the high school lets the mas-
ter gardeners store their plants
for a spring garden seminar.
On Tuesday, Holen and fel-
low master gardeners Linda
Holmes and Pamela Gar-
ner prepared a mix of Port-
land cement, vermiculite and
peat moss used by students to
make hypertufa flower pots,
their bases made from card-
board boxes, a wicker basket,
a pottery bowl and an Oxi-
Clean bucket.
Students shoveled and
spooned the hypertufa mix
into the forms, hollowed
out in the middle with bottles,
fishing floats and Tupper-
ware containers. Next month,
the students will pop their
pots out of the forms and
plant them with cacti and
sedum for the plant sale in
May.
“These children have the
opportunity that they could
work in a capacity like a
greenhouse, something that’s
repetitious and they have
plenty of support for them,”
Holen said. “And I just love
seeing that possibility — you
can see it in their eyes, they
start to grow when they do
this.”
Getting out
Gardening is something
freshman Ryan Breitmeyer
said he remembers his mother
doing, and that he would like to
learn more about.
“It’s really relaxing for me,”
he said. “There’s really no
rush when you’re doing it by
yourself.”
Breitmeyer said he enjoys
getting out of the classroom
and around campus, whether
it’s planting in the greenhouse
or interacting with other stu-
dents at lunch.
Overseeing the students
each month in the greenhouse
is Deborah Stemper, a spe-
cialist in Astoria, Jewell and
Knappa school districts with
the Youth Transition Program.
Stemper said the Fresh
Starts program provides stu-
dents with a sense of accom-
plishment when they see their
finished products.
“It’s a wonderful tool to
work with the kids to help them
develop skills,” she said. “The
benefits are endless.”
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