Acclaimed reef scientist & physicist Peter Ridd posted the following on his FaceBook
Corals are effectively thermometers that record the temperature of the water in which they live. The ratio of various elements in the calcium carbonate skeleton can be used to work out that temperature. Drill a hole in a particularly large coral and you can work out the temperature. This new paper published in Nature shows that the GBR was just as hot a couple of centuries ago.
The paper showed
other data from the Coral Sea and Melanesia which indicates that it is now hotter than in the last few hundred years – and of course all the headlines are about that.
But this data shows that there is nothing unusual about the water temperature on the GBR.
And let’s not forget that the water temperature on the GBR is a few degrees less than in the waters of the Coral Triangle’ (PNG Indonesia etc) where the corals are even more diverse and grow much faster. And all the bleaching events in the last few years have left us with record amounts of coral.
