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  • 04 Jul 2014

A growing number of scientists are predicting a major El Niño weather event this year, which could wreak havoc across South America and Asia, causing droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events that impact industry and farming. But the effects on the world’s coral reefs could be even more disastrous.

The last significant El Niño in 1997-98 caused the worst coral bleaching in recorded history. In total, 16% of the world’s coral was lost, and some countries, like the Maldives, lost up to 90% of their reef coverage. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology suggests there’s a 70% chance of an El Niño occurring this year — and all signs indicate it could rival the 1998 event.

El Niño arises from a confluence of factors that are still not fully understood, but its outcome is clear: parts of the ocean get hotter. A band of warm water develops in the western Pacific, while the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool — a heat blob spanning much of Indonesia — starts oscillating wildly. This could spell disaster for the Coral Triangle, a Southeast Asian bioregion considered the underwater equivalent of the Amazon, home to more marine species than anywhere else on Earth.

“In 1998, the Coral Triangle started to bleach in May and continued until September,” says Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a marine biologist and head of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland. “The Coral Triangle experiences prolonged periods of temperature anomaly during an El Niño because the equator passes through its middle, so it experiences both northern and southern hemisphere summers.” Professor Hoegh-Guldberg, who led the Oceans chapter of the IPCC report on climate change, is less than optimistic about the prospects for the region’s coral reefs. “It only takes about half a degree above background sea temperatures to cause bleaching,” he explains. “Atmospheric scientists are telling us we’re headed for temperatures that will surpass those of 1998.”

Source: El Niño Could Spell Disaster for Coral Reefs by Johnny Laggenheim in The Guardian, as published on climatecentral.org. To view the source article, click here.