Introduction
This week will see some news that will be twisted and churned by the climate change sceptics…
Apparently, the coral islands are responding well to sea-level rises, which are real, make no mistake.
The New Scientist article is here and the BBC News item is here.
The Reality
In my previous post, The Maldives and Tuvalu will be Alright Without People, I pointed out just such a fact. My reasoning was based on the not-so-recent research and conclusion of Charles Darwin into the creation and maintenance of coral islands, reefs, atolls and submerged sea mounts.
Now, recent measurements as described in the New Scientist prove this is so.
But there’s still no room for optimism because the reason that islands like Tuvala and The Maldives are suffering is because of human interference… How so?
A. Because people keep using the coral for building materials, and smooth out it’s natural deposits into runways and hotels for tourists and the like!
This far beyond what the coral can naturally replenish by accretion from storms and it’s natural growth.
Ancient History
One other aspect comes into the “coral equation”.
Coral almost disappeared following a major extinction event!
Dinosaurs and Coral
The KT event which wiped out the dinosaurs and left room for our own eventual evolution, also wiped out 90% of coral species.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/…Tertia…event#Marine
Quoting from this source,
Further analysis of the coral extinctions shows that approximately 98% of colonial species, ones that inhabit warm, shallow tropical waters, became extinct.
Prior to this, in the greatest known extinction event at the end of the Permian Era, far worse damage was done to corals. See link. Quoting from the article:
The event had a profound effect on the terrestrial ecosystem, which is still being felt today, a quarter of a billion years later….
Nothing resembling a coral reef shows up until 10 million years after the Permian extinction, and full recovery of marine life took about 100 million years…
Now this is serious shit! Because we are right now part of a mass extinction event, started by our own human activity, that will one day show up as such in the geological record.
Currently the coral can keep pace with increasing water temperatures and rising sea levels as it did at the end of the recent glacial period ~12k years ago.
But for how long?
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