'Clock is ticking' for Great Barrier Reef - Sunshine Coast magazine

A world without the Great Barrier Reef – it’s an alarming concept.

"My Weekly Preview" - a free magazine
circulating on the Sunshine Coast directly
addresses damage to the Great Barrier Reef.

This wonder, as we know it, has changed forever, and if current scientific predictions are correct, much of it could be dead within 20 years.

Earlier this year, news broke that the billion-dollar tourist attraction, which covers an area of 344,400 square kilometres (a bit bigger than Italy) and is home to an array of marine life including 1600 species of fish and six of the world’s seven marine turtle species, has experienced its third mass coral bleaching episode in the past 18 years.

News of the coral carnage made headlines around the world.

The National Coral Bleaching Taskforce – a collaboration of scientists from across the nation – reports that 93 per cent of the reef, which dates back 500,000 years and is the largest living structure on earth, has been affected.

Read Candice Holznagel‘s story in My Weekly Preview - “The clock is ticking on climate change – but have we left our run too late?”