The Great Barrier Reef Is Doomed
James Cameron, the phenomenal director behind Titanic and Avatar, is also an avid deep-sea explorer in his spare time. He’s extremely passionate about the planet and the environment, and issued an extremely blunt warning while talking to journalists in Sydney on Monday. He said that unless things change regarding global warming and the environment, the Great Barrier Reef will die.
Cameron said that the Great Barrier Reef, which extends for more than 2,300 kilometers (1,420 miles), and is comprised of thousands of separate reefs, will continue to experience reef bleaching, and it’ll get to a point where there’s no return.
Reef bleaching occurs when coral expels the algae living in their tissues, which causes the coral to turn completely white, and this has been happening on the Great Barrier Reef on Australia’s east coast for years. A study by the Nature Journal found that one third of the corals on the Great Barrier Reef were damaged in a reef bleaching event in 2016, and more bleaching occurred in early 2017.
“The heating, even a few degrees, can cause the symbiotic algae in coral to depart and coral bleach, and then it becomes an unhealthy reef system, and then it ultimately fails,” Cameron said. “This is something that if we don’t course correct with regards to the carbon we are dumping into the atmosphere, it’s going to become an inevitability. The Great Barrier Reef will die, it’s that simple.”
“I think those deeper ecosystems have survived for millions of years, and will survive millions of years longer,” he said. “It’s that thin skin of life up near the top of the ocean we need to put our focus on now. We need to think not about saving the ocean by going into the ocean more, but we need to think about saving the ocean by how we behave here on the land.”
“The ocean has become the toilet of human civilisation,” he said “Between our consumption from the ocean and our waste cycle into the ocean, we have pretty much condemned the ocean to a highly degraded state, if not utter doom if we don’t acknowledge that and course correct.”
The Australian government allocated over $400 million to the protection of the Great Barrier Reef earlier this month, so let’s hope this money will help, and that people will change their habits to not cause any further damage.
