My first encounter with the midsummer Med came as a physical shock— the surface water in Cyprus was like a hot tub , and those in search of a cooling swim had to dive down twenty feet to experience relief from the 100 degree onshore heat. Now that the Gulf of Mexico is often just as torrid, and corals in south Florida are in as much trouble as those in the Persian Gulf or the southern Levant, the world has begun to notice. The NYTimes reports from Dubai:
Coral Reefs Are in Trouble. One Lab in the Desert Is Trying to Help.
A program in the United Arab Emirates is growing corals native to the Persian Gulf that have evolved to withstand high temperatures.
Not far from where superyachts are docked in a Dubai marina, almost 1,000 pieces of coral, trimmed a month ago, are being grown in four aquariums in a laboratory.
A land-based laboratory in the Arabian Desert may seem like an unlikely spot for regenerating coral reefs. But, already, the corals are brighter than when they were cut in mid-November.
“We can start to see the sign that the coral is starting to grow slowly from the top,” Ahmed Hamdy, a coral farm manager, said. In six to 12 months, when the corals are healthy enough, Coral Vita, a private company working to restore reefs, will relocate them to waters outside of Dubai.
It’s part of an experiment. Coral restoration programs are up against long odds because of climate change and environmental degradation, but marine scientists say they are critical for ensuring that certain species of coral do not become extinct. And corals in the Persian Gulf have evolved to withstand high temperatures, making them some of the best candidates for understanding how reefs react to extreme heat.
At the United Nations climate summit taking place in Dubai, negotiations have focused less on the global biodiversity crisis than on finding an agreement on reducing fossil fuel production. But healthy, rich ecosystems, in addition to nurturing plants and animals, are critical for storing carbon and protecting shorelines.
Corals reefs occupy less than 0.1 percent of the ocean’s floor, but 25 percent of all known marine species depend on them at some point in their life cycles. In addition, they “stop storm waves in their tracks,” said Tali Vardi, the executive director of the Coral Restoration Consortium, a group dedicated to supporting coral restoration practitioners
But extreme heat is taking a toll even on the hardiest reefs around the world. By some estimates, the world has lost half of its coral cover since 1950.
Record temperatures in 2017 led to the second mass bleaching event around the United Arab Emirates, which caused the loss of 66 percent of the coral coverage across eight major reefs in the southern Persian Gulf, according to John Burt, an associate professor of biology at New York University Abu Dhabi.
