ing for cattle and new developments along the coast,” Tager says.
“There’s talk of a gas pipeline, plus the oil industry keeps pushing to
open up offshore drilling just beyond the eastern boundary of the park
in the Coral Sea. The government, of course, keeps pushing these
schemes while failing to pursue renewable energy strategies.”
Magnetic Island is like Catalina Island with death adders. “They
like to lie under piles of leaves,” Ann Trager advises, as she shows me
the family’s wooded, leafy backyard. The most visited of the Great
Barrier Reef islands, Magnetic is rich in tropical birds and wildlife. It
is home to adders, pythons, rock wallabies, sea eagles, flying foxes,
curlews, koalas, and equally cute marsupial possums. It also has its
own living coral reefs, but no longer in Nelly Bay.
The hottest year in recorded history, 1998, saw a global outbreak of
coral bleaching as corals’ thermal tolerances were exceeded by a com-
bination of gradually warming sea temperatures spiked by that year’s
El Niño phenomena. The idea that climate change is accelerating El
Niño warming and the La Niña ocean cooling that follows it has
become a subject of growing scientific concern. The U.S. State
Department’s Coral Reef Task Force reported that the extensive 1998
global bleachings were a direct result of climate change caused by the
burning of fossil fuels.
“When we saw 1,000-year-old coral colonies bleaching and dying,
that’s something new, at least in recorded human history,” agrees Paul
Hough, a friendly, sun-reddened Magnetic Island resident and
research scientist with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.
Hough specializes in coral reproduction. “I was looking at the
corals that didn’t die, and found their reproduction was down to 40
percent of normal the first year after the bleaching and was at 80 per-
cent the second year,” he says. “Now they’re experiencing 1.5-degree
below-normal water temperature from La Niña, so we’ve had a four-
degree swing in four years. With greater frequency and severity of El
Niño/La Niña events, it will be more difficult for corals to recover from
these kinds of impacts. I think we’re seeing not a crash, but a slow
decline of the [reef ] system.”
Hough and other observers believe nearshore fringing reefs are at
the most immediate risk because they already face other stresses from
Australia, Florida, and Fiji 131