Annual Loss Of Coral Cover Across Great Barrier Reef Worst In 40 Years; 25% Mortality In North, 40% At One Tree Island
The Great Barrier Reef has suffered its biggest annual drop in live coral in two out of three areas monitored by scientists since 1986, a new report has revealed. The Australian Institute of Marine Science (Aims) report is the first to comprehensively document the devastating impacts of the early 2024 mass coral bleaching event – the most widespread and severe on record for the Great Barrier Reef. In the months that followed that event, scientists described a “graveyard of corals” around Lizard Island in the north and a study recorded the death of 40% of corals at One Tree Island in the south.
Aims has conducted annual in-water surveys of the world’s biggest reef system since 1986, checking the health and extent of corals. This year’s survey report found that in the reef’s northern section – between Cooktown and the tip of Cape York – bleaching, two cyclones and associated flooding had caused coral cover to fall by 25%. In the southern section, from Mackay to just north of Bundaberg, coral cover had fallen by 30%. The northern and southern zones suffered the highest annual drops on record.
Coral cover fell by 13% in the central section, which had escaped the worst of the heat in 2024. Dr Mike Emslie, who leads the long-term reef monitoring program at Aims, said coral cover was becoming more volatile. “It has been a pretty sobering year of surveys with the biggest impacts I have seen in the 30-plus years I have been doing this,” he said. “This volatility is very likely a sign of an unstable system. That’s our real concern. We’re starting to see record highs in coral cover that quickly get turned around to record falls.”
EDIT
The 2024 and 2025 events were part of an ongoing global mass coral bleaching event that led to more than 80% of the planet’s reefs being hit with enough heat to cause bleaching, affecting corals in at least 82 countries and territories. A study last year found ocean temperatures on the Great Barrier Reef were likely at their hottest for at least 400 years and were an “existential threat” to the Unesco World Heritage-listed reef. Widespread mass bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef was first seen in 1998 and happened again in 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022, 2024 and 2025.
EDIT
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/05/great-barrier-reef-suffers-biggest-annual-drop-in-live-coral-since-1980s-after-devastating-coral-bleaching
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Last edited Wed Aug 6, 2025, 08:03 PM - Edit history (9)
We are really making progress as a species.
You may like graphic hatrack..I saw it somewhere years ago but can’t remember where:
I kept it as it was a rare find at the time in that it acknowledged human overpopulation as a serious environmental issue. Cato/Koch did a good job of shutting down that topic ably assisted by various kinds of useful idiots.
It makes a good companion piece to these two pictorial depictions of other fans of the planet..one for the Global North, one for the Global South. It still only covers two countries, but I couldn’t be bothered to go and collect graphics of creeps from China, Russia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe etc to be fair and balanced. I am not sure Western Europe is as huge a fan of the planet, though they are getting there.
At any rate, I felt that these two creeps represent all the other creeps in spirit. What do cultural, racial, national and religious differences matter when the heart is pure and bent on the same goal of planetary destruction development.
Going by how the left and right work, Kumbaya may well be accomplished by the right first as the left bickers and splinters, while that sort of single-minded commintment to cooperative, extractive rapaciousness has to be team building. All very heartwarming looked at correctly.
We don’t really have a left over here imo-or at least not one that makes even a perfunctory nod to environmentalism. It’s presented as a man versus ecosystem argument. Apparently instead of learning from the errors of the Global North we would like to add them to our indigenous errors. So that’s cool.
The second one is from the India Times. Sadly I can’t remember where the first one is from. It really captures the sensory effect overall.
This Salon writer I rather like, Chauncey DeVega, covers it very well..the shock to the human psyche of that style of theatre..
If anyone uses the internet to inform and educate, you do hatrack. Always thought that was cool.
I am becoming pretty overtly irascible myself lately..I came to the US in 2000..by 2003 I started noticing more consciously how fucked up everything was (specifically wrt the environment). I have been safely back in the Global South since 2014 and far from that nice man who runs that really cool holiday camp in El Salvador. He even has a sense of humor, which I like..he says things like Boom! on that other nice man’s creepy little informative and misunderstood site, as people are brutally taken away to gulags facilities.
My point though is that 22 odd years of pretending to be a mildly dim-witted, nice, gullible lady who buys that our great societies are not trying their best to burn the planet down is wearing on me…
"We have met the enemy and they are ours.” - Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, September 10, 1813
Never came across it formally. Looks like just the sort of thing I enjoy. Will make a nice companion to my Calvin & Hobbes/Farside 
.
I found another old one which is environmentally themed. You may be familiar with it OkItsJustMe-Mark Trail…
Love cartoons…This one looks right up me alley 
:
https://www.vindy.com/life/burton-cole/2019/11/pogo-possum-and-his-friends-speak-words-of-wisdom/
• “The best break anybody ever gets is in bein’ alive in the first place. An’ you don’t unnerstan’ what a perfect deal it is until you realizes that you ain’t gone be stuck with it forever, either.” — Porky Pine
• Porky Pine: “Y’know, ol’ Albert leads a life of noisy desperation.”
• “A lump in the throat is worth two on the head.”
I like the sound of Albert - he sounds like a fellow traveller ;-/…
(The actual Albert from the cartoon that is ..not some sort of hideous AI bot tricked out as Albert).