Our Beautiful Ocean

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THE OCEAN

Vast, mysterious, and haunting, the ocean has inspired many due to its sheer size, power, and unremitting beauty.

Not only is the ocean teeming with precious marine life, it's the lifeblood of planet Earth itself, providing us with oxygen, absorbing carbon, and covering over three-quarters of Earth.

An estimated 2.2 million species live in the ocean.

Over the last 240 million years, coral reefs have evolved into one of the largest and most complex and diverse ecosystems on the planet.

Healthy coral reef ecosystems are like bustling cities, with buildings made of coral and thousands of marine inhabitants coming and going, interacting with one another, carrying out their business. In this sense, coral reefs are the sea’s metropolises.

Coral reefs provide shelter for nearly one third of all known marine species. They are home to more than 4,000 species of fish, 700 species of coral, and thousands of other species of plants and animals. Scientists estimate that, in total, more than one million species of plants and animals are associated with the coral reef ecosystem.

Coral reefs also protect shorelines from storms and contribute to local economies through tourism.

Unfortunately, as greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels drive the oceans' temperatures up, climate change has become the single leading cause of coral bleaching bleaching.

Bleaching primarily results from temperature stress, when surrounding water temperatures are higher or lower than the coral organism’s optimum range.

When stressed enough, corals expel their zooxanthellae, revealing the white calcium-carbonate skeleton and producing a “bleached” look.

More than 75 percent of Earth’s tropical reefs experienced bleaching-level heat stress between 2014 and 2017, and at nearly 30 percent of reefs, it reached mortality level. The scientists summarized the event in stark terms: More than half of affected reef areas were impacted at least twice.

This global event has punctuated the recent acceleration of mass bleaching. Occurring at an average rate of once every 25–30 years in the 1980s, mass bleaching now returns about every six years and is expected to further accelerate…. Severe bleaching is now occurring more quickly than reefs can recover, with severe downstream consequences to ecosystems and people.

People also pose the greatest threat to coral reefs. Overfishing and destructive fishing, pollution, warming, changing ocean chemistry, and invasive species are all taking a huge toll. In some places, reefs have been entirely destroyed, and in many places reefs today are a pale shadow of what they once were.

Nonetheless, there is some cautious optimism right now. If the world can meet its goals under the Paris climate agreement to avoid the worst effects of global warming, there is still hope that some of the stronger reefs will still exist in the future.