Australia is a crucial location on Earth that is home to thousands of species and their unique habitats. The Great Barrier Reef is extremely outstanding from all other tropical coral reefs in the world: it provides the specific needs corals and its inhabitant require for survival, which includes translucent water, warm temperatures, high salinity levels, and solid substrates (Blanchfield.) As a Junior in High School, I took the AP Environmental Science course, which goes in depth of Mother Nature’s wonders. We have learned from the raw elements necessary to form a compound crucial to vegetation and wildlife to the changes it has gone through ever since humans began to tamper with nature and its exploitment. I increasingly became interested because bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef is not new information nor statistics; it has just been ignored and neglected from care. We often focus solely on the beautiful views and pleasure this natural wonder (visible from space) brings to our eyes. Climate change has been singled out as the culprit for the effects it has had on these tropical waters, nonetheless, regulations are yet to enforce the protection and maintenance of this magnificent natural wonder.
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I encountered a surplus of information on the Great Barrier Reef’s increasing bleaching levels and how climate change is causing extreme changes in our oceans, including thermal expansion, and the shifting of the conveyor belts. Despite my objective to find articles explaining the effects these changes would have on the surrounding environments of the corals themselves, they all seemed to focus on the idea of its effect on decreased tourism and its economic losses. Scientific articles on the Great Barrier Reef and its current conditions do not reach the point of presenting these ‘other’ irrelevant ecosystems, which ironically, are absolutely necessary for the successful growth and development of healthy corals. Although they are an important factor in the equation, everyone’s focus seem to deviate toward the effects on monetary values, which can lead anyone to make the assumption the Great Barrier Reef’s value is seen as an economic gain without considering its importance in our oceans nor our health.
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Header borrowed from “Earth Porm"
http://earthporm.com/great-barrier-reef/
http://earthporm.com/great-barrier-reef/