Climate Change: The Great Barrier Reef

Testing the Waters

Where has all the color gone? Parts of the Great Barrier Reef have undergone an aesthetic decline, reflecting the dangers from global warming that the vast, fragile ecosystem faces. Photograph by Stephen Dupont for TIME

Mar. 05, 2011 - Shark humor has its time and place, but not when I'm snorkeling somewhere called Shark Bay. At the Heron Island Research Station, a laboratory on the teardrop-shaped atoll 45 miles (72 km) off Australia's east coast, the suntanned, chirpy station manager gives a parting wave to the three students who are taking me out for my first look at the legendary corals of the Great Barrier Reef. "Just don't get eaten, will you?" she says. Ha-ha. Happily, there are no sharks in Shark Bay that morning; in fact, there's not a whole lot of anything. As I follow the students' snorkels, we pass over circular beds of brown, monochromatic coral and empty expanses of rippled sand. A handful of small, glimmering fish hover in the water column, but they're the only life we see during an hour-long swim. Where are the schools of coral trout? The famed Maori wrasse? Wading back to shore, one of the students shrugs: "Sorry there wasn't more."

The Great Barrier Reef is one of the world's natural wonders, covering an area larger than Italy and drawing nearly 2 million tourists every year to boat, swim, snorkel and dive amid its elaborate flora and fauna. It generates some $6 billion in revenue for Australia annually and provides employment to more than 50,000 people. It's also one of the planet's most fragile ecosystems, home to more than 11,000 species that live, if not necessarily in harmony, in a carefully orchestrated symbiotic balance. At the foundation of this giant ecological and commercial enterprise is one tiny marine organism: the coral. (See pictures of the otherworldy flora and fauna of the coral triangle.) {cointinued}