Great Barrier Reef

Everybody claims to care about the Great Barrier Reef, but very few people take the time to actually visit it.  The reports of mass coral bleaching this past summer are mostly from aerial surveys flown at 150 metres altitude in aeroplanes and helicopters. I have repeatedly argued that you can’t see very much from that distance. The Institute of Public Affairs have

According to The Guardian, John Brewer Reef is at the “centre of a widespread coral bleaching event” with its corals in a “battle” against an “unprecedented” sixth event. The ABC reported similarly, and the story has made headlines around the world. So, Jennifer Marohasy and I thought we would go to Brewer and see how the corals have fared a

It is all over the news, right across the world: the Great Barrier Reef is bleaching – again.   Children can’t sleep at night: it is not only the war in the Ukraine keeping them awake at night, but also our apparent disregard for nature. Except! On 10th April 2022 I went to the very epicentre of the claimed latest severe mass

The Bill introduced by Nick Dametto of Katter’s Australian Party’s (KAP) in the Queensland Parliament to reverse Labor’s pointless Reef Regulations (see here), was defeated by a combination of Labor and Liberal-National (LNP) parliamentarians last week. The Reef is in extremely GOOD condition – at record levels by some measures such as coral cover. The levels of farm pesticide concentrations

There is a smell of something worse than failure: The Queensland government is claiming that the mackerel fish stocks on the reef are at alarming low levels, and it wants to drastically curtail or close the fishery. They base this on two things:​​​​​​​ (a) Calculations of fish stock going back to 1912, from data on fish catch and how many

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has uploaded some footage of John Brewer Reef that is part of the Underwater Museum of Art, the footage was apparently taken by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in February.   It does not show a lot of bleached coral, but it does show some badly bleached individual colonies – and a lot of healthy

The media is reporting that there is bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. Bushfires, cyclones, floods, droughts, heatwaves, bleaching, locust plagues, starfish plagues – this is Australia. It has always happened. The good news is that GBRMPA have refrained from sensationalism and should be congratulated for that. In their media comment, they point out that bleached coral is not dead

Almost nobody knows about the remarkable coral reefs right at the mouth of the Brisbane River, which are presently under the muddy plume of the Brisbane River flood. Those reefs are not “protected” by the harsh reef regulations that apply to almost all other corals on the Queensland coast. This is huge government hypocrisy. The closest reef is only 4

The concept of ocean acidification, and human-caused global warming more generally, could be described as containing a grain of truth embedded in a mountain of nonsense. Indeed, the projected large increase in atmospheric CO2 will at most cause a small reduction in pH – it will not turn the ocean acidic. Yet this is what is implied by the term

The feature image is the view from a drone up about 120 metres, of me floating above the front of Pixie Reef, an inshore reef just to the north of Cairns.  This reef was categorised by Terry Hughes as badly bleached, flying at about 150 metres and looking out from an airplane window. The Great Barrier Reef is vast: a