There’s a diversity of traits in places where weird plants thrive

The Great Barrier Reef has become the warmest sea surface temperature for 400 years in the past decade, according to a study of coral skeletons

An assessment of coral skeletons has shown that the past decade has been the warmest for the Great Barrier Reef for 400 years. Researchers looked at the chemical composition of coral that was older than 1618 to create a record of temperatures. They developed a model that said it is unlikely that recent record-breaking temperatures will occur without human-caused climate change. The study suggests that much of the world’s coral could be lost as the reef is in dire straits.

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a professor of marine studies at the University of Queensland, said in a press briefing that he believes the Great Barrier Reef is at risk of getting bleached out next year. “It’s very, very worrying to know that we’re quite close to [that] point, and I think this will happen in the next 10 years,” Hoegh-Guldberg said. While corals can survive bleaching, reefs generally need one or two decades to recover from severe mass bleaching, according to the related article.

Corals produce calcium carbonate skeletons that form the reefs. The skeletons of corals that can grow for centuries allowed Henley and his coauthors to look into the past. As they grow, they form bands that scientists can study like tree rings. They contain chemical signatures that show heat stress in certain years. The temperature of the water at the time when the corals were still growing relates to the strontium to calcium and oxygen isotope ratios.

There is no consistent data on sea surface temperatures before 1900. But the researchers were able to combine what data was available from direct measurements with data from skeleton core samples to build a statistical model that they then used to reconstruct temperatures going back to the 1600s. The Great Barrier Reef tend to be the hottest waters in the world during January and March.

That’s how they discovered that those periods in 2024, 2020, and 2017 reached the highest temperatures in four centuries. 2024 has been the most remarkable, roughly 1.73 degrees Celsius above the reconstructed average between 1618 and 1899.

The Future of Coral Reefs in the Presence of an Extreme Warming Event: Implications for UNESCO and the Natural History of the Great Barrier Reef

Corals can stay bleached for some time and still make it, so we won’t know the full impact until after the recovery phase. “But if we continue to see this level of accelerated warming and more frequent bleaching, that recovery process is going to degrade pretty quickly.”

Policies currently in place to slash greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels still aren’t enough to stop things from getting much worse. Global average temperatures are still on track to rise between 2 to 3 degrees Celsius higher than they were before the industrial revolution. Previous research has estimated that even a two-degree rise could be enough to wipe out 99 percent of the world’s coral reefs.

It’s necessary for us to believe in it if we are going to keep it going. “It is possible … if we take the right level of action on greenhouse gasses and we seek out and protect corals that have a good chance of surviving this type of scenario, then we will set us up for a future with coral reefs.”

The researchers think that the evidence might eventually force the United Nations cultural organization UNESCO to reconsider its decision this year not to include the Great Barrier Reef on the list of endangered World Heritage sites.

But researchers caution that the impacts of this year’s mass bleaching event aren’t completely captured in the report and that scientists might not get a full picture of the coral mortality for another 6–9 months. Neal Cantin, a coral scientist at AIMS and one of the people who helped to lead the surveys, says that about 30% of the reefs are still at risk.

The Nature Podcast: Identifying biodiversity in drylands with a game about publishing or surviving a published publication (extended version)

Don’t miss an episode. The Naturepodcast can be downloaded on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, or your favourite app. An RSS feed for the Nature Podcast

 is available too.

A new board game calledPublish or Perish can be fun if you want to mock the idea of publications as the core currency of a scientist’s career. Created as a way to help researchers “bond over shared trauma”, the game features many mishaps familiar to academics, scrambles for funding and scathing comments, all while players must compete to get the most citations on their publications. Reporter Max Kozlov set out to avoid perishing and published his way to a story about the game for the Nature Podcast.

The study reveals that the plants show a greater diversity in the dry environment. A variety is a measure of an environment’s performance and can include the size of a plant. Although there are good data regarding this type of diversity, an assessment of drylands hasn’t been done. A new study found that trait diversity doubled when there was an expectation that fewer types would be displayed. The team behind the work hope that it can help us better protect biodiversity as the planet warms and areas become drier.