According to Coral Reef Watch, coral bleaching in the Maldives has begun escalating to dangerous levels since Friday and has since been maintained at "alert level 1."
Coral bleaching in the Maldives has begun to reach dangerous levels.
According to Coral Reef Watch, which analyzes and publishes global ocean temperatures, coral bleaching in the Maldives has begun escalating to dangerous levels since Friday and has since been maintained at "alert level 1."
Currently Central and Southern Maldivian ocean territories remain at that level.
There are five stages of coral bleaching;
1. "No stress" or no threat of bleaching stage
2. "Watch" or caution stage
3. "Warning" or threat of bleaching stage
4. "Alert level 1" or dangerous stage
5. "Alert level 2" or most dangerous stage
"Coral Reef Watch" predicts that in the coming five weeks the Maldives ocean territory will reach "alert level 2" or most extreme stage of bleaching.
Scientists have recently predicted that this might be largest coral bleaching event since the year 2016.
Nizam Ibrahim, a marine biologist who led a team to assess the impact of the 2016 mass coral bleaching event told Mihaaru News that the current mass bleaching event was occurring at a time coral systems in the Maldives have just begun to recover from the mass bleaching event witnessed eight years ago.
Nizam added that with temperatures on the rise, the damage from mass coral bleaching events across the Maldives was expected to be severe, as many coral systems have already begun to show signs of bleaching.
"All reef scientists say that impact of bleaching will be more severe compared to 2016," he said.
Coral bleaching is a phenomenon that occurs when corals lose their vibrant colors due to stress and rising ocean temperatures.
When bleaching occurs, corals expel the colorful zooxanthellae living in their tissues, revealing the white calcium carbonate skeleton underneath, hence the term “bleaching”. When bleaching occurs, corals are left without their main energy source and are more vulnerable to disease and will starve to death unless conditions improve and the zooxanthellae return.
This has also been declared the fourth global mass coral bleaching event by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and The International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI).
Since the first incident of bleaching was reported in 1998, such occurrences have been increasingly frequent. One of the most significant events since that year was the 2016 coral bleaching event.
During this period, coral bleaching was extensively studied. According to a report published by the Maldives Marine Research Institute (MMRI) following the study, 73 percent of the Maldives' coral systems had experienced bleaching.
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