NASA Helps Monitor Bleaching :Travel The Great Barrier Reef in Australia
The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is the world's largest coral reef system, composed of roughly 3,000 individual reefs and 900 islands that stretch for 2,600 kilometres (1,616 mi) and cover an area of approximately 344,400 square kilometres (132,974 sq mi). The reef is located in the Coral Sea, off the coast of Queensland in northeast Australia.
The Great Barrier Reef can be seen from outer space and is the world's biggest single structure made by living organisms. This reef structure is composed of and built by billions of tiny organisms, known as coral polyps. The Great Barrier Reef supports a wide diversity of life and was selected as a World Heritage Site in 1981. CNN has labelled it one of the seven natural wonders of the world. The Queensland National Trust has named it a state icon of Queensland.
A large part of the reef is protected by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, which helps to limit the impact of human use, such as overfishing and tourism. Other environmental pressures to the reef and its ecosystem include water quality from runoff, climate change accompanied by mass coral bleaching, and cyclic outbreaks of the crown-of-thorns starfish.
Due to its vast biodiversity, warm clear waters and its accessibility from the floating guest facilities called 'live aboards', the reef is a very popular destination for tourists, especially scuba divers. Many cities along the Queensland coast offer daily boat trips to the reef. Several continental and coral cay islands have been turned into resorts, including the pristine resort island of Lady Elliot Island.
As the largest commercial activity in the region, it was estimated in 2003 that tourism in the Great Barrier Reef generates over AU$4 billion annually. (A 2005 estimate puts the figure at AU$5.1 billion.) Approximately two million people visit the Great Barrier Reef each year. Although most of these visits are managed in partnership with the marine tourism industry, there are some very popular areas near shore (such as Green Island) that have suffered damage due to overfishing and land based run off.
A variety of boat tours and cruises are offered, from single day trips, to longer voyages. Boat sizes range from dinghies to superyachts. Glass-bottomed boats and underwater observatories are also popular, as are helicopter flights. By far, the most popular tourist activities on the Great Barrier Reef are snorkelling and diving, for which pontoons are often used, and the area is often enclosed by nets. The outer part of the Great Barrier Reef is favoured for such activities, due to water quality.
Management of tourism in the Great Barrier Reef is geared towards making tourism ecologically sustainable. A daily fee is levied that goes towards research of the Great Barrier Reef. This fee ends up being 20% of the GBRMPA's income. Plans of management are also in place for the popular tourist destinations of Cairns and the Whitsunday Islands, which account for 85% of the tourism in the region. Policies on cruise ships, bareboat charters, and anchorages limit the traffic on the Great Barrier Reef.
The 2003 Pixar film, Finding Nemo, featured the Great Barrier Reef as a setting.
Lady Elliot Island is the southern-most coral cay of the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. The island lies 85 kilometres north-east of Bundaberg and covers an area of approximately 40 hectares. The island is home to a small resort and airstrip, which is serviced daily by flights from Gladstone, 1770, Bundaberg, Hervey Bay, Maroochydore, Brisbane and the Gold Coast. Visitors to the resort can stay in a variety of accommodation, from suites to tent cabins. Activities on the island include reef walking, scuba diving, snorkelling and bird, turtle and whale watching. The island is particularly renowned for its scuba diving and snorkelling, as its location far offshore at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef results in unrivalled water clarity.
Lady Elliot Island is one of only six island resorts on the Great Barrier Reef, and one of only three with direct flight access to the island airstrip. The island is located within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in the highest possible classification of Marine National Park Zone as designated by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. Lady Elliot is an island teeming with life and live corals, famous for a resident population of 40 manta rays which form the iconic logo of the island's resort.
NASA satellites that monitor ocean color and temperature have joined a global effort to study the worrisome bleaching of coral in Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the U.S. space agency said Wednesday.
Coral reefs get bleached when water is too warm, which forces out tiny algae that live in the coral and help it to thrive and give it its vivid color, NASA said in a statement. Without these algae, coral can whiten and eventually die.
"Australia's Great Barrier Reef is the largest and most complex system of reefs in the world, and like so many of the coral reefs in the world's oceans, it's in trouble," said oceanographer Gene Carl Feldman of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington.
NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites offer data about ocean surface temperature and color, available online within three hours of the satellites' pass. Color is linked to the concentration of chlorophyll in ocean plants, and shows changes in the ocean's biological productivity.
Researcher Scarla Weeks at the University of Queensland, Australia, use the satellite data to observe changes in sea surface temperatures and ocean primary productivity along the Great Barrier Reef and surrounding waters.
"The Great Barrier Reef is an icon, and we just want to know what we can do to save it," said Weeks in the statement. "Sea surface temperatures over the last five months are actually higher in certain locations now than they were in 2002 when we witnessed the worst bleaching incident to date."
References
Reuters. 2006. NASA Helps Monitor Bleaching of Great Barrier Reef(online)from www.nasa.gov
wikipedia. 2007. Australia(online)from www.wikipedia.org
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