Elliot Peters works as scuba diving instructor at a resort on Heron Island, Queensland, in the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef and, in recent weeks, he’s had to tell curious guests why so many of the corals around the island are turning bone white. “You can see it on their faces,” said Peters. “There’s definitely some remorse and sadness.”
The reef is in the middle of its fifth mass bleaching event in only eight years – an alarming trend driven by global heating in a year that has seen record global ocean temperatures.
Peters has never seen a mass coral bleaching event up close before, but this summer he’s seen ancient boulder corals that can live for hundreds of years bleaching and showing signs
