The marine treasures of Colombia are often overlooked, as the country is known more for its mountains and the colourful towns that dot its coffee region. But just below the waves, a vibrant undersea world with over a thousand square kilometres of coral reef awaits those who take the plunge.
The world’s best-known coral reefs could be extinct by the end of the century unless we do more to make them resilient to our warming oceans.
Stunning images of a just-discovered deep-sea coral reef near Tahiti travelled across the world on Thursday – the result of a UNESCO-supported scientific mission to map the oceans.
For dive team member Laetitia Hedouin, from France’s National Centre of Scientific Research, it was an exciting chance to examine how living coral can adapt to our warming seas, as she told UN News’s Daniel Johnson.
One of the largest coral reefs in the world has been discovered by a UN-supported scientific mission off the coast of Tahiti. Announcing the stunning find on Thursday, UNESCO said that divers had explored large rose-shaped corals spanning some three kilometres, at depths of between 30 and 65 metres.
Between 2009 and 2018, the continuous rise in sea temperature cost the world 14 per cent of its coral reefs – that’s more than the size of Australia’s reefs combined – a UN-backed report revealed on Tuesday.
Coral reefs are in grave peril, and the consequences of their extinction could be catastrophic. They support more than a quarter of all marine life, but 90 per cent could disappear by 2050, largely as a result of climate change.
Every one of the world’s coral reefs could bleach by the end of the century, unless there are drastic reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has warned.
Sounding the alarm about the urgent need to protect coral reefs from extinction within decades, a new coalition of organizations, including the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), was launched on Wednesday in Egypt during the UN Biodiversity Conference, to galvanize global leadership before it is too late.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about self-proclaimed “coral nerd” Zack Rago, is that he grew up in the land-locked US state of Colorado.
Coral reefs around the world are vanishing at an unprecedented rate, as highlighted at the UN Ocean Conference in early June.
As part of an effort to find out why - and to reveal the underwater mystery of coral reefs to the world – Mr Rago took part in the new documentary Chasing Coral, which was screened recently at UN Headquarters in New York.