This coevolutionary venture has been under way for many geologic
epochs. Researchers now believe it won’t last out the Anthropocene. “It is
likely that reefs will be the first major ecosystem in the modern era to
become ecologically extinct” is how a trio of British scientists recently put
it. Some give reefs until the end of the century, others less time even than
that. A paper published in Nature by the former head of the One Tree
Island Research Station, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, predicted that if current
trends continue, then by around 2050 visitors to the Great Barrier Reef
will arrive to find “rapidly eroding rubble banks.”
I CAME to One Tree more or less by accident. My original plan had been
to stay on Heron Island, where there’s a much larger research station and
also a ritzy resort. On Heron, I was going to watch the annual coral
spawning and observe what had been described to me in various Skype
conversations as a seminal experiment on ocean acidification.
Researchers from the University of Queensland were building an elaborate
Plexiglas mesocosm that was going to allow them to manipulate CO 2 levels
on a patch of reef, even as it allowed the various creatures that depend on
the reef to swim in and out. By changing the pH inside the mesocosm and
measuring what happened to the corals, they were going to be able to
generate predictions about the reef as a whole. I arrived at Heron in time
to see the spawning—more on this later—but the experiment was way
behind schedule and the mesocosm still in pieces. Instead of the reef of
the future, all there was to see was a bunch of anxious graduate students
hunched over soldering irons in the lab.
As I was trying to figure out what to do next, I heard about another
experiment on corals and ocean acidification that was under way at One
Tree, which, by the scale of the Great Barrier Reef, lies just around the
corner. Three days later—there is no regular transportation to One Tree—
I managed to get a boat over.
The head of the team at One Tree was an atmospheric scientist named
Ken Caldeira. Caldeira, who’s based at Stanford, is often credited with