Make That Dive NOW, or Never

In a comment to a brief post of mine yesterday (Fiddling While the Planet Burns), reader Chasing Moksha left a lengthy quote from an article by AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein, Caribbean Coral Suffers Record Death. There has been quite a bit of discussion of this unhappy phenomenon is the past several years, but this piece points out that last year's record surface heat was more or less a coup de grace for this ongoing process:

For the Caribbean, it all started with hot sea temperatures, first in Panama in the spring and early summer, and it got worse from there.

New NOAA sea surface temperature figures show the sustained heating in the Caribbean last summer and fall was by far the worst in 21 years of satellite monitoring, Eakin said.

The same ocean surface temps that brought the extraordinary hurricanes are causing what one of the quoted scientists called "an underwater holocaust." However, this is the paragraph that really grabbed me:

"It's an unprecedented die-off," said National Park Service fisheries biologist Jeff Miller, who last week checked 40 stations in the Virgin Islands. "The mortality that we're seeing now is of the extremely slow-growing reef-building corals. These are corals that are the foundation of the reef ... We're talking colonies that were here when Columbus came by have died in the past three to four months." (My emphasis)

Is it progress that what it takes Nature hundreds of years to create, and we're talking about an entire ecosystem here, not just something pretty and pink, can be destroyed by the results of our petroleum lifestyles in just several months?

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