It’s like a team of obsessive compulsive scientists turned up to capture a magic show in slow-mo

They descended on Palmyra Atoll in 2009 and kept going for ten years, taking 1,500 photos across eighty plots of corals. They looked at all the living things on the ocean floor, and not just the hard corals, but the algae, the microalgae, and the turf. They followed plots where waves crashed and plots that were calm. Then they went through the photos with detailed digital-tracing and image analysis and tracked them — not just through one, but two full bleaching cycles and what they found was recovery. Stability!

In May this year their 10-year study of Palmyra Atoll was finally published

Palmyra is an isolated atoll, 1,300 km south west of Hawaii, with a tiny population. It’s about as pristine as anything can get, unaffected by human pollution, except of course, for CO2 — that fertilizer from the sky which is everywhere. If it was a problem, this was a good place to find out.

In 2015 a savage pool of warm water arrived that bleached not just ten or twenty percent of the corals but blitzed right through ninety percent. It […]