Climate Apocalypse NEVER: Australia's Great Barrier Reef Recovering Nicely

The Australian Institute of Marine Science has issued it's 2020/2021 Great Barrier Reef monitoring results in a very readable and interesting report found here. The results are that all sections of the reef are dramatically recovering from some serious affects of nearly a decade of adverse heating events, crown of thorn predation and cyclone damage and related sediment deposition. 

They surveyed 127 reefs with a towed device to record images and data.  They've done this every year since 1985. It's really quite a robust effort and the results are so accessible to the layman like me. These people are sane, high integrity people --- not like the doom and gloom media outlets.

The amazing thing to think about is how nature is so resilient. After countless stories of the reef's decline/death due to global warming, all of a sudden, the reefs rebound massively!  Nature finds a way to live and adapt!

The summary of the report says the following:

• Over the 35 years of monitoring by AIMS, the reefs of the GBR have shown an ability to recover after disturbances. 
• In 2021, widespread recovery was underway, largely due to increases in fast growing Acropora corals. 
• Survey reefs experienced low levels of acute stressors over the past 12 months with no prolonged high temperatures or major cyclones. Numbers of outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish on survey reefs have generally decreased; however, there remain ongoing outbreaks on some reefs in the Southern GBR.
• Overall, 59 out of 127 reefs had moderate (>10% - 30%) hard coral cover and 36 reefs had high (>30% - 50%) hard coral cover.  
• On the Northern GBR, region-wide hard coral cover was moderate and had continued to increase to 27% from the most recent low point in 2017.
• On the Central GBR region-wide hard coral cover was moderate and had increased to 26% in 2021.  
• Region-wide hard coral cover on reefs in the Southern GBR was high and had increased to 39% in 2021. 
• In 2020, most of the surveyed reefs experienced heat stress accumulation that produced widespread coral bleaching but was below thresholds where widespread mortality is expected to occur. Consistent with this, surveys in 2021 recorded low coral mortality from the 2020 bleaching event.
• In periods free from acute disturbances, most GBR coral reefs demonstrate resilience through the ability to begin recovery.

Here's the Institute's graphs of coral coverage over time for the Northern, Central and Southern sections of the Great Barrier Reef:

Here's a summary of improvement in coral cover, improvment (decline) in Crown of Thorns (COT) attacks and any bleaching effects (click to enlarge for all images):

Will the exaggerated and hyped doom and gloom of the media ever end??