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Caitlin Seaview Survey
This was among the healthy coral found in deep waters below Australia's Great Barrier Reef during the October 2012 work by the Caitlin Seaview Survey.
A robot diving deeper than any human diver has found that coral deep below Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is very healthy even though the shallower coral is suffering from storms, warming seas and pollution. The robot’s handlers hope the deeper coral will provide the "recruits" needed to naturally repair the shallower reefs.
"Up until now our knowledge was limited to the shallow reefs accessible by scuba diving," Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, chief scientist for the Catlin Seaview Survey, said in a statement announcing the findings. "In reality, that provided us with an incomplete picture."
The remote-operated vehicle, he added, allows scientists to study coral at depths between 90 and 300 feet, "revealing a wholly different picture which now includes the deep reef environment."
John Bruno, a University of North Carolina coral expert not associated with the survey, welcomed the work. "This is a popular idea," he said of deeper coral providing a refuge, "just not well tested."
Caitlin Seaview Survey
The robot used by the Caitlin Seaview Survey takes a sample from a deepwater area of Australia's Great Barrier Reef during its October 2012 work.
Carden Wallace, a coral expert at the Museum of Tropical Queensland, added that it's not only the abundance but the diversity that surprised her. "Using the ROVs to film and collect samples at this scale is simply unprecedented in Australian waters," Wallace said.
That diversity includes corals that "are much flatter, more plate-like than the branching and domed shapes seen nearer the surface," said Pim Bongaerts of the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute. "This is the corals responding to the reduced light conditions and spreading out to maximize their exposure to light.
"So far below the surface, the light is blue because all other parts of the spectrum have been filtered out," Bongaerts added. "It is a monochrome world until you turn on strong lights to reveal amazing, beautiful, fantastic colors."
Seaview Survey, in partnership with Google, has been capturing 360-degree views of famous coral reefs. NBC's Savannah Guthrie reports.
The layer of coral just below the shallow reefs could be the key to repairing the reef system.
It "could provide coral recruits for the upper levels of the reef, providing a potential for them to help in the recovery," Bongaerts said. "At the moment we know little about the extent of larval movements between the shallow and deep reef, but we are seeing species that exist in both zones."
Related: 'Major decline' in Great Barrier Reef coral
Related: 360-degree views of Great Barrier Reef
Bruno was optimistic that nature would play a role in recovery. "The deep water habitats can/will be a sort of refuge," he told NBC News, calling it "a natural source to repopulate shallow habitats that have been more affected by warming, bleaching, disease, storms, etc."
Caitlin Seaview Survey
A starfish sits on storm-damaged coral in shallow waters of Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
The findings come a month after the Australian Institute of Marine Science reported that the Great Barrier Reef has lost half its shallow-reef coral cover in the last 27 years.
The Catlin team, for its part, is planning six more surveys along the 1,600-mile-long reef system. It plans to later study reef systems around the world, using ROVs as well as cameras with 360-degree views.
See dozens of wonders from coral reefs and other exotic seascapes, courtesy of the Catlin Seaview Survey.
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This may be wonderful news, but I suspect the global warming deniers will grab onto it as proof that global warming is just a myth. "See, the Earth knows how to heal itself - even from the worst that man can throw at it".
Still, maybe we do have a little better chance by having this knowledge.
Of course. Deniers who don't actually give a crap about coral will use it to try to win their political game.
Maybe O'bama can deny he was trying to lower the seas! He could blame it on one of Al Gore's films!!
Well this is a partial help, while lower light corals can do well at depth the more sensitive high light corals mostly SPS corals have no chance at those depths. Although the light will penetrate at the 420 nm range(blue) it wont have the intensity the photosynthetic zooanthellae algae require in these corals.
The only thing I can see working for the SPS corals is farming them like they are doing in the Florida Keys, The other sources may come down to research facilities and privately owned aquariums. Unfortunately it requires a great degree of skill and knowledge to keep these corals healthy long term in private home aquarium and most "samples" don't make it. Howerver home systems and skills have greatly increased in quality over the past two decades so I believe there is hope.
Can't they cast an artificial crown onto the healthy coral? And kill off that nasty looking red fish too.
HEALTHY CORAL AREN'T THE ANSWER !!!
If you plant healthy coral in the same warm waters, guess what you'll get ! DEAD CORAL.
Correct, but the time to start farming them is now, along with measures to bring down ocean temps which would mean just farming them at this point. Farmed corals in the Key's are actually growing at a faster rate than the naturally located corals. Interesting thing is they are placed at the same depth near the natural colonies to maintain the same water currents and they are growing faster and healthier for some reason. They are using the same "fraging" techniques used in home aquariums.
Ocean surface temps are in the low 80's in the tropical/subtropical area's of ocean. Locating farmed corals just a few feet deeper than they are at now will bring the water temperature down, but there would need to be studies to select the best locations. They require temps from 74-78 degrees F. Pollution is also an issue.
Crowning the corals will kill them, the tissue needs sunlight for the photosynthetic zooanthellae algae to provide nutrition for the corals to live, they also need to be able to filter plank-tonic food from the water.
The fish is a Harlequin Tusk and is a coral and fish eater, it is from the Wrasse family and critical to maintaining the balance in the ecosystem.
I agree the earth is warming, but has also done so on it's own accord before. It has also cooled on its own accord.
"there have been forest fires in the past, and they've gone out of their own accord. therefore it's ok to throw petrol bombs in the forest"
same logic, mate.
Crazy Tree Huggers - YouTube
To me, it just says. The deep sea inhabitants, will be the last to die. I call it, trickle down pollution.
The Earth will be fine,once man is gone!
Man can dive to about 200 feet with SCUBA gear. Beyond that, most research has been conducted to the absolute deepest parts of the ocean, leaving the sea from 200 feet down to over six miles relatively unobserved and definitely unexplored. Why do we need to go into space (well, a lot of people need to be sent into space, but...) when almost HALF of our own planet remains undocumented and unexplored? Everybody who wants to go live in space meet at Newt Gingrich's house and take the bus out to Rush Limbaugh's place for the weekend to go 'flying high'.
Why does deep sea exploration and the exploration of space have to be mutually exclusive? There are wonderful marvels to be discovered in both places.
In one sense it is probably commendable that scientists of different disciplines are working to save the planet as we know it. But they know better than most of us that the world has gone through cataclysmic and climatic changes for millions of years. We may be the first species to have studied the evolution of the universe and we're certainly the first species to give a hoot. But we need to recognize that despite the various creation stories we earthlings have adopted to satisfy our pre-science curiosity, the day of the human will come and go as well. We will be replaced by life forms not yet developed just as earth's current inhabitants have replaced life forms that no longer exist except in fossil form. Get used to it, earthlings.
Yup I can just see it 100,000 years in the future, the next "highly intelligent" species geologists will find fossilized humans and maybe even some of our technology. I can see them taking ice cores to study and they will look at the rapid change and their first thought will be that some kind of cataclysmic event destroyed the ecosystem with accelerated climate change. Then they will test deeper and find the carbon had heightened exponentially through the last 200 years. They will realize we were smart enough to build the technology we had, so we must have been able detect the problem we were causing. Then they will wonder why, if we had all this data and technology, why didn't we didn't do something about it.
Then they will come to the conclusion as a species we were highly advanced but also highly stupid, ignorant, arrogant and self absorbed. I hope they treat the planet better than we have.
How is this deep water coral going to help repair the coral which is effected by global warming, pollution and storms?? Is someone going to stop these events...??
These are the same corals that grow at shallower depths, they just grow sideways instead of upward, this increases their sun exposure. See posts 1.3 and 1.6. One of these deep water reefs was discovered in the Gulf of Mexico and is supposed to be either the, or one of the deepest reefs on the planet. That was before bp screwed up the gulf, who knows now I have never seen any reports on it since bp's ongoing fiasco.
About a week ago there was a graph and comment on the graph that was showing that the earth has been cooling for the last 16 years. What I can believe is in mind control and propaganda on behalf of most of the news media and opportunists. Global Warming or Global Cooling which is it??????????
It is global warming, it is easy to make a graph showing a decrease in temperature over a ten year period. If you look at the same graph complete for 100 years the overall trend is warming. The ten year graph is deceptive because although it shows a down trend for ten years that sections end is at a higher temp than the previous section of ten years end, this creates the illusion of cooling.
Watch the link for a much better understanding
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/climate-of-doubt/
What warming seas?
Temps are pretty much normal. Barely warmer on one side of Australia , barely cooler on the other.
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom_new.gif
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/oisst/amsr-anom-bb.gif