Today, the family decided to go snorkeling. The plan was to get up a 7:45 and get picked up at 9:30. But of course, things didn't go as planned. For the past day or two, I've been sharing a room with Griffin in a little cottage. This morning I was woken up by a strange noise. Grumbling and mumbling I reached over blindly for my phone and the screen flashed: 6:30. Then I heard Griffin calling, “here kitty kitty, come on kitty how did you get in here?”. Groaning, I got up out of bed and saw that there was a cat in our outdoor shower. So that was my morning, and of course I couldn't fall back asleep, so I just got up. After all of the packing and breakfast and running around was done, we finally made it to the boat. There were probably 25 people on the boat and we quickly motored off to find some good snorkeling spots. All in all, we saw and touched an octopus, saw gorgeous fish, swam down next to quick turtles, and most of all, looked at coral reefs.
The coral reefs in Indonesia are beyond anything I've ever seen, full of fish and occasional splashes of color. But that’s the thing. I don't know what a real and alive coral reef looks like. When I see reefs nowadays, I see only a couple of parts that are alive. The rest is gray and dead, slowly breaking off and dissolving in the water. The sad part is that the dead reef is what I thought an alive reef looked like. But I learned that reefs that are alive are colorful and moving and have a massive amount of sea creatures surrounding them. Because they are part of the ocean cycle, they give food to many sea animals, and now there is a lot less food in the ocean due to the dying reefs.
In 2004 there was a massive tsunami, and most of the Indonesian coral survived, which was very rare. Now, that coral off of the northwestern coasts of Indonesia are dying at an alarming rate. Scientists say that the cause is dramatic increase in water temperature, and they're saying that other reefs across Asia are in just as much danger. Marine biologists from the Wildlife Conservation Society say that in May 2017, they recorded surface temperatures off of the island Sumatra in Indonesia. The water there was 34 degrees Celsius, which is 4 degrees above long term averages.
Another reason why the coral is dying is due to expansive coral bleaching. Coral bleaching is when algae in coral tissues are expelled. The reason it's called coral bleaching is because the color it turns looks like the color of bleach or gray. The reason it turns a different color when it's dead is due to warmer water and way more exposure to sunlight that is unfiltered by clouds or wind. This unfiltered sunlight is due to a warming atmosphere with less protection because of how many greenhouse gasses we are emitting. Studies by Australia’s James Cook University and Indonesia's Syiah Kuala show that 80 percent of the corals that have been experiencing coral bleaching and warmer water temperatures have died in Indonesia's seas.
These beautiful reefs can grow back. The only problem is, they need their normal water temperatures again, and the world’s oceans are only getting hotter. For coral reefs, the future doesn't look good, and most reefs in Indonesia, and in Asia in general, are serious danger of being wiped out completely.
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