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Corals survive 542m years of supervolcano, asteroids, 125m sea level change only to go extinct any year now

Will Corals Survive?, asks a group of international scientists.

Corals first appeared 540 million years ago, but having made it through supervolcanoes, mass extinctions, and an asteroid impact equivalent to 10 billion Hiroshima A-bombs, it’s now likely they will be wiped out because a trace gas has risen from 20% up to 25% of levels common for half of the last 300 million years.

Graph, paleohistory, climate change, CO2 levels, cambrian, Scotese and Berner 2001

Source: www.geocraft, Scotese and Berner 2001

Having made it through the volatile last 65 million years, and multiple ice ages where the oceans rose and fell by as much as 125m repeatedly, it will be tragic if the current man-made warming phase wipes them out. According to one thousand tide gauges the worlds oceans are relentlessly rising by 1mm every year. While corals coped with the last 125,000mm of sea level rise, it’s not clear they will still be around if it rises another 20mm.

65 million years of temperature change on Earth. Graph.

Current climate change marked in

The team of 22 researchers admit “there is still a lot to understand about corals,” and “there are major knowledge gaps”.  But despite not knowing much, the experts on marine ecosystems advise that “our only real chance for their survival” is to control the global climate.

While they don’t actually predict the exact year the world will be coral-free, they do say “The time to act is now, as the window of opportunity to save coral reefs is rapidly closing…”

Looks like that’s it for 542 million years of the evolution of corals. Pfft. A world without coral?

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