Coral reefs: "an unprecedented die-off"

Global warming is killing coral reefs: "an unprecedented die-off"

Thanks in large part to global warming, at least one-third of the coral in the Caribbean, much of it many centuries old and virtually irreplaceable, has died in the last year.
A mound several feet high of star lobed coral at Buck Island Reef National Monument in St. Croix, Virgin Island, that was bleached and stressed in the fall of 2005 because of record-hot waters in the Caribbean. In Puerto Rico, colonies of 800-year-old star lobed coral died from the bleaching.

"It's an unprecedented die-off," said National Park Service fisheries biologist Jeff Miller, who last week checked 40 stations in the Virgin Islands. "The mortality that we're seeing now is of the extremely slow-growing reef-building corals. These are corals that are the foundation of the reef ... We're talking colonies that were here when Columbus came by have died in the past three to four months.

Thanks to Bob Harris for the depressing news of the day