Here is an article I wrote that was published explaining discoveries made this year.
Overseas tourists have begun to doubt the value of a trip to the ailing Great Barrier Reef and it is getting increasingly difficult to “show people what they expect to see”, a dive operator has told a federal Senate inquiry.
A Port Douglas operator, John Edmondson, said “last-chance tourism” was spurring on other visitors but there had been a “weird” lull in bookings this year after back-to-back mass bleaching events made dead coral an unavoidable sight on reef visits.
“This is the first ever documented occurrence of coral bleaching in consecutive years for the Great Barrier Reef,” Neal Cantin, a Canadian coral biologist, tells me. While he is careful to note that the majority of bleaching occurred in specific sections of the reef, namely the northern region, and that even in a single reef the extent of bleaching can differ widely, he does concede that the damage has been severe.