Great Barrier Reef, Australia [image credit:BBC]
This makes a change from the more usual climate-related doom-and-gloom reef scenarios often served up by the media.
Researchers have identified a series of robust reefs that may act as sources to replenish areas of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) damaged by severe disturbances such as bleaching events and cyclones, reports ABC News.
The “robust source reefs” typically lie on the outer shelf fringes of the GBR where ocean currents push deeper, cooler water toward the surface, reducing the severity of heat stress.
It is hoped that these reefs may temper the decline of the GBR as climate change pressures continue to mount, according to Scott Condie from the CSIRO’s Oceans and Atmosphere department in Hobart.
“They’re the bank for the future of the reef,” Dr Condie said.
“Even though they represent a small percentage of the total reefs, they have the ability to actually replenish probably almost half the reefs within a given season, which is very encouraging.”
Robust reefs most common in southern GBR
In the paper published today in PLoS Biology, the researchers identified 112 reefs which met the robust source reef criteria.
These reefs are identified as being less vulnerable to bleaching. They are also exposed to currents that would convey coral larvae across a significant area of the GBR.
Importantly, they also have a “lower risk of conveying a crown of thorns starfish outbreak”.
Spread by larvae carried on ocean currents, similar to coral, crown of thorns starfish has been responsible for 50 per cent of the total GBR decline between 1985 and 2012, according to the Australian Institute for Marine Science.
Although robust source reefs were identified across the length of the reef, from just north of Gladstone to Cape York, they were only sporadically distributed north of Townsville.
Continued here.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
So, they had not really looked before. Who would have guessed? People who really know reefs, have known this and much more for years, generations even. Snowflakes, not so much.
“more robust than was thought, say scientists.” They keep thinking that they can think.
In 1962 I went on a school trip to the GBR, out from Mackay and the Whitsundays. We didn’t go to the reef on the brochure but elsewhere (which was spectacular via glass bottomed boat).
When I asked the one of the deck hands why the change of venue, he said “Oh, it’s lost colour. Bits of the reef do that every year. That bit will be OK in about 2 years”.
55 years later and tens of millions in ‘research’ money…..
That’s it Graeme3. In an expensive nutshell.
Nitrite oxidation may have a greater impact on the carbon cycle than previously assumed.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6366/1046
– – –
In the deep ocean, these bacteria play a key role in trapping carbon
The organisms oxidize the nitrogen compound nitrite to “fix” inorganic carbon dioxide
BY CAROLYN GRAMLING NOVEMBER 28, 2017
A mysterious group of microbes may be controlling the fate of carbon in the dark depths of the world’s oceans.
Nitrospinae bacteria, which use the nitrogen compound nitrite to “fix” inorganic carbon dioxide into sugars and other compounds for food and reproduction, are responsible for 15 to 45 percent of such carbon fixation in the western North Atlantic Ocean, researchers report in the Nov. 24 Science. If these microbes are present in similar abundances around the world — and some data suggest that the bacteria are — those rates may be global, the team adds.
http://www.sciencenews.org/article/deep-ocean-these-bacteria-play-key-role-trapping-carbon
Oh dear, they have found something they should have found years ago – it only needed them to stop thinking and start doing.
This is the whole problem with the climate religion, it is all thought and no doing. If they started applying real evidence based science to what they are doing the idea of a trace gas being the devil would have been thrown out before its elimination became the scam it is.
From http://eo.ucar.edu/staff/rrussell/climate/paleoclimate/coral_reef_proxy_records.html
The coral polyp animals actually live in a symbiotic relationship with a type of algae, which requires sunlight for photosynthesis.
I wonder where is the research on how the ver important symbiotic algae have evolved and changed over the ages as the climate has changed? Is it not reasonable that as the climate varies then the population and types of these symbiotic algae vary?
The fundamental point though is reefs and corals have already proved that they can successfully ride out massive changes in climate, by surviving for the last 200 million years. Is it reasonable to think that these robust symbiotic community structures can be overstressed by the current, all natural, changes in climate? Modern corals have only been around for at least 20 times longer than all human-like bipeds, and people really thought a tiny change in climate could wipe them out or seriously affect their number.
Only complete idiots could think such nonsense.
tom – and yet there are heads of state and church and hordes of so-called scientists who claim at least that they do believe it
Reality will catch up with them but how long will it take?
Yes OB,
But unfortunately so few objective and scientifically skeptical published researchers are working on the Great Barrier Reef, or for that matter on matters pertaining to climate change.
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.