But an Australian government study released last week found<br />that over all, last year brought “the highest sea surface temperatures across the Great Barrier Reef on record.”<br />Only 9 percent of the reef has avoided bleaching since 1998, Professor Hughes said,<br />and now, the less remote, more heavily visited stretch from Cairns south is in trouble again.<br />“In the north, I saw hundreds of reefs — literally two-thirds of the reefs were dying and are now dead.”<br />The damage to the Great Barrier Reef, one of the world’s largest living structures, is part of a global calamity<br />that has been unfolding intermittently for nearly two decades and seems to be intensifying.<br />“We didn’t expect to see this level of destruction to the Great Barrier Reef for another 30 years,” said Terry P. Hughes, director of a government-funded center for coral reef studies at James Cook University in Australia and the lead author of a paper on the reef<br />that is being published Thursday as the cover article of the journal Nature.<br />Large Sections of Australia’s Great Reef Are Now Dead, Scientists Find -<br />By DAMIEN CAVE and JUSTIN GILLISMARCH 15, 2017<br />SYDNEY, Australia — The Great Barrier Reef in Australia has long been one of the world’s most magnificent<br />natural wonders, so enormous it can be seen from space, so beautiful it can move visitors to tears.<br />Water temperatures there remain so high that another round of mass bleaching is<br />underway, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority confirmed last week.
