By Tabitha Lipkin
I just returned from the trip of a lifetime, a trip to THE Great Barrier Reef. It’s the first place people always ask me if I’ve been to when I tell them I’m a Dive Master, but it’s just been sitting on my bucket list… until now. And this trip completely changed my understanding of what’s actually happening on the GBR.
I know that you’ve probably heard that the Great Barrier Reef is dead or dying, but that’s not actually the case. The Great Barrier Reef is experiencing a massive bleaching event that is affecting about 75 percent of the reef, but it’s FAR from dead. Because in the coral world, bleaching and death are not synonymous.
Mark Olsen, the CEO of Tourism Tropical North Queensland put it this way– “The word bleaching can be a little confusing for people because it sounds like something permanent, you know, if the curtains fade they’re permanently changed, but the corals bleach when the temperatures are too high for the zooxanthellae, but they recover also. So what we’ve seen in the last few years is actually the highest coral cover in the 32 years that we’ve been recording coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef.”
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