Rising Ocean Temperatures are "Cooking" Coral Reefs | National Geographic

Foreign. We've now had three major bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef: in '98, 2002, and again just recently in 2016. We zigzagged along the whole length in a helicopter and fixed-wing plane. We put about 100 people underwater.

The extent and severity of this bleaching is off the chart. Typically, a bleached coral is nutritionally compromised, but this time around, we discovered an additional phenomenon. Many of the corals we surveyed were already dead; they actually cooked! And that's because the temperatures this time around were so extreme.

Already in 2016, severe coral bleaching has also been recorded across the Pacific Ocean in Fiji, across the Indian Ocean in the Maldives and the Seychelles, and even in the southern Red Sea.

Similar events are predicted across the Caribbean and Micronesia in a year in which the impacts of heat stress on the global ocean have reached unprecedented extremes. As the distribution of marine species continues to change, as storm surges continue to intensify, as sea ice and glacier melts accelerate, and as sea level rise and human displacement intensifies, countries around the world in Paris last year have committed to a rapid transition away from fossil fuels towards a more sustainable, renewable energy.

Paris marked the moment when the world finally decided to heed the ever-rising mountain of evidence that has been piling up for years and began instead to galvanize our focus.

Is foreign.