This is pessimistic but it seems to me that Florida is absolutely and incredibly fucked. It's not even an uphill battle to protect the keys and Everglades, it seems unwinnable without absolutely massive and rapid global shifts, or am I just a doomer?
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
A race is under way in Florida to rescue corals that are being bleached at alarming rates as a result of this summer’s historic heatwaves and rising water temperatures.
Several factors have accelerated the decline in healthy coral including rising water temperatures and acidity as a result of climate change, in addition to pollution, overfishing, storms and disease.
One of the main reasons behind Florida’s current mass bleaching event – which is usually expected around late August and September – is record temperatures that have been arriving earlier in the year, warming the ocean significantly.
July is incredibly early to be seeing these temperatures on our reefs,” Cynthia Lewis, the director of the Keys Marine Lab at Florida’s Institute of Oceanography, told the Guardian.
A 2022 study found that the Florida Keys, particularly along the southern island coasts, “revealed very strong increasing trends” of marine heatwaves over the years, adding that the detected positive trends and “especially the recent high peaks of MHW events, may enhance the loss of specific heat-sensitive species, damaging the biodiversity of this tropical coastal environment”.
Perhaps most importantly, the coral reef also acts as a buffer to the Florida coastline during storms, an extreme weather event occurring more frequently as another catastrophic result of climate change.
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Fuuuck
Earlier this month, the Coral Restoration Foundation visited the Sombrero reef in the Florida Keys, a restoration site that the foundation has been working at for over a decade. “What we found was unimaginable – 100% coral mortality,” Phanor Montoya-Maya, CRF’s restoration program manager, said in a statement.
The reef they’ve been nurturing for 10 years died. 90% of the state’s corals have died. They are rescuing hunks of coral to keep in cooled aquaria on land in an attempt to preserve genetic diversity for the future.
Why? The corals can’t be transplanted back into the ocean until the average temperatures drop down, which isn’t going to happen before Florida’s coastline is severely eroded because there are no corals now to protect it. The “new” coastline won’t be proper coral habitat, even if the water does cool back down to 1970s temperatures.
Maybe they can use their tanks of coral to seed the coastlines of states further north, which will be warm enough in a few years, if not already, and will need the reefs for protection from increased storms. But I don’t see it being feasible in Florida.