14 DAY TRIAL // This May 14, a team of University of Bristol researchers went public with the findings of their investigation into how climate change and global warming are affecting tropical coral reefs.
These specialists maintain that, unless measures to restrict greenhouse gases-related warming of oceanic waters are soon taken, coral reefs located in relatively shallow waters are bound to experience a serious decline in the years to come.
According to the official website for the University of Bristol, Dr. Elena Couce commented on her and her fellow researchers' findings as follows:
“If sea surface temperatures continue to rise, our models predict a large habitat collapse in the tropical western Pacific which would affect some of the most biodiverse coral reefs in the world.”
“To protect shallow-water tropical coral reefs, the warming experienced by the world’s oceans needs to be limited,” Dr. Elena Couce further argued.
These specialists say that, according to the computer models they pieced together and analyzed as part of this investigation, geoengineering might prove an efficient means of keeping ocean temperature well under control and keeping it from soaring above levels that might prove detrimental to coral reefs.
However, such measures are not likely to yield significant benefits on the longer run.
This is because, despite their managing to tackle the predicted increase in oceanic water temperatures, they fail to address one other phenomenon: ocean acidification.
As previously reported, ocean acidification basically comes down to the altering of the water's chemical make-up as a result of its absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide.
“The use of geoengineering technologies cannot safeguard coral habitat long term because ocean acidification will continue unabated.”
“Decreasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the only way to address reef decline caused by ocean acidification,” Dr. Elena Couce said.
As well as this, the researchers fear that geoengineering could prove to be more efficient than initially planned and desired, meaning that it could cool oceans a tad too much and therefore trigger an early decline of coral reefs.
Given these issues, the researchers maintain that the best way to protect coral reefs is to curb the increase in ocean temperatures by limiting the amount of greenhouse gases released in the atmosphere.