This is a very delicate balance, and every dreamcoated fish and giddily tinted worm depends on it. Five times in the geological record, reefs have mostly or entirely vanished from the face of the earth, leaving corals to drift on the ocean currents for millions of years at a time, largely dying off until their preferred climatic conditions returned. Still, I find it impossible from my subaquatic vantage point to imagine that Hardy Reef could die, that virtually all life could one day cease to exist on the Great Barrier Reef as a whole. It’s a fantastical notion, a witch’s curse in a Teutonic fable. Maybe the sun won’t rise tomorrow, and maybe the coral reef will no longer teem with fish. Surely such a dying would come here only at the very last, at the black end of some much wider catastrophe.
Well, sorry, Charlie, but here’s a twist you couldn’t possibly have seen coming from the crow’s nest of the Beagle: it’s the water. It’s grown too warm, and absorbed way too much carbon dioxide. The pH is off, down from 8.2 to maybe 8.1. Not much, but it could mean everything. The beginning of some kind of unthinkable end.
I’ve only just heard. That’s why I came.
melbourne, victoria / 37°49’ s, 144°57’ e /
café patio, newquay promenade /
three weeks earlier
The Age, June 7, 2008:
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, more than 25 million years in the making, is “an icon [of] primordial wilderness,” says Dr. Veron — it is the greatest structure created by life on earth. The idea that it might be mortally threatened within the span of a generation or two he would once have considered preposterous.
“I was wrong,” he says.
Twin assailants, both creatures of climate change, threaten the reef and oceans more generally. The lesser of these is the warming of the water, which turns the single-celled algae on which corals rely for their sustenance toxic, compelling the coral to expel them and probably die — the event known as coral bleaching — or to keep them and certainly die.
The worst bleaching events of history will become commonplace by 2030, says Dr. Veron, and by 2050, “the only corals left alive will be those in refuges on deep outer slopes of reefs. The rest will be unrecognisable — a bacterial slime, devoid of life.”
The even greater threat is ocean acidification — the dissolving of carbon dioxide into the sea, forming weak carbonic acid. This is the climate change frontier to which science is swinging [with] increasing focus, as alarm grows at the threat it poses to marine ecosystems and to human food supplies and economies.
This Dr. Veron’s byline in A Reef in Time, the chronicle of the life and impending death of the Great Barrier Reef whose release prompted this stunning report, reads “J. E. N. Veron,” but the author actually goes by Charlie. That’s Charlie as in Darwin — “Little Mr. Darwin,” one of his schoolteachers once called him, because the prepubescent J. E. N. Veron was so obsessed with bugs and such. Somehow the nickname mutated into Charlie, and it stuck, even though Veron himself didn’t read On the Origin of Species until years later. He studied dragonflies to earn the “Dr.,” and for reasons I’ll come back to he abandoned a promising career in entomology to become the world’s most prolific coral taxonomist (having personally identified and named 23 percent of the planet’s coral species), former chief scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, and nowadays a grise whose éminence in his field is so uncontested that he is identified, in the press releases accompanying scientific declarations with dozens of Ph.D.-wielding signatories, as “the world’s foremost expert on coral reefs.”
So there I was, leafing idly through the pages of Melbourne’s prestige daily, a cool winter breeze coming in off the harbour and setting its corners flapping, my mind still fuzzy with jet lag of International Date Line grade. A sunny morning on the pretty new boardwalk in the city’s redeveloped Docklands, a cup of bold Melburnian coffee, one of those inside-page special interest stories to pass the time. A pair of full-colour before-and-after pictures of coral bleaching. And the world’s foremost expert on coral reefs saying, without much in the way of qualification, that his learned opinion is that the Great Barrier Reef will be largely bereft of life by 2050, after which time whatever remains will be finished off by the over-acidified Coral Sea. That whatever world we might, if we’re quite lucky and extremely bold, wrest from the jaws of this mutated climate, whatever equilibrium we might hope to reach, it is already not the one we knew. Not the one that provided the stable foundations for 12,000 years of this thing we call civilization. Not the Holocene epoch at all, perhaps, but something else, something new.
