Survey photos reveal damage of this year’s global coral bleaching event

NOAA announced yesterday that a global coral bleaching event is underway. Bleaching due to heat stress is expected to impact approximately 38 percent of the world’s coral reefs—and almost 95% of those in U.S. waters—and kill coral covering more than 12,000 square kilometers of reefs around the globe. This year’s event is only the third-ever worldwide bleaching event in recorded history, following devastating events in 2010 and 1998.

For a global bleaching event to be declared, all three ocean basins need to have recorded bleaching—when corals expel their food-producing, symbiotic algae—across multiple reefs spanning 100 kilometers or more. After widespread bleaching events in the Indian and Pacific Ocean basins earlier in the year, ocean scientists and community-based monitoring teams at NOAA, XL Catlin Seaview Survey, the University of Queensland, and Reef Check verified that bleaching is now occuring from Florida and Cuba east to the Dominican Republic.

This is a video produced by Google showing coral bleaching before and after images from American Samoa which were uploaded into Google Street View in June 2015. The images were taken by XL Catlin Seaview Survey.

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