Arriving at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in October 2016, Tim Gordon thought he was living a dream. As a boy growing up in the southeast African country of Malawi, he’d covered his bedroom walls with Technicolor reef posters and vowed one day to explore those underwater worlds. The marine biologist was unprepared for what he found: a silent and colorless field of submerged rubble.
At Lizard Island, off the northeastern coast of Queensland, Gordon hoped to study the sounds of the reef’s creatures. “A reef should be noisy,” with crunching parrot fish, scraping sea urchins and myriad squeaks, rumbles and whoops of other marine animals, says Gordon, of the University of Exeter in England. But many of these creatures had vanished as climate change warmed the ocean, triggering widespread coral bleaching in 2016 and 2017.
“Instead of documenting nature’s wonders,” he says, “I was documenting its degradation.”
Scientists like Gordon are grieving over the ecological losses they’re witnessing firsthand. They are worried about the probability of more losses to come and are frustrated that warnings about the dangers of unchecked carbon emissions have gone largely unheeded.
Already, climate change is altering the environment at a quickening pace. Glaciers are losing billions of tons of ice each year (SN Online: 9/25/19). Wildfires and storms are growing more intense and destructive (SN Online: 12/10/19). Permafrost, which locks carbon in the earth, is thawing, disrupting Arctic communities, releasing carbon and accelerating warming.
And thanks in part to other human-caused threats, including pollution and habitat destruction, 1 million species are at risk of extinction (SN: 12/16/19, p. 5).