Grave Barrier Reef

Jo Chandler

Many of today's marine scientists blame Jacques Cousteau, who surfaced in their lounge rooms during their formative years, for luring them into the water. Others were hooked by the psychedelic barrage of coral gardens and sea creatures in National Geographic. Through the '60s and '70s, the co-evolution of scuba technology, underwater photography and colour television took millions of earthlings on their first beguiling voyage into the deep.

Until then, the submarine world was, for most people, as remote as the just-trodden Moon. For the University of Queensland's Professor Justin Marshall, however, terrestrial life was never really on the cards. His father was Dr Norman Bertram 'Freddy' Marshall, 'curator of Her Majesty's fishes' at the British Museum (Natural History), and his mother, Olga, was a scientific illustrator who captured her husband's discoveries in ink and watercolour.

Young Justin was the marine science equivalent of an army brat, floating around research bases in the Bahamas and Florida between stints at an Essex house where pickled specimens from the world's oceans were collected, lifeless and eternal, in jars.

'I was a nerdy little bugger,' Marshall recalls, 'correcting graduate students at age seven on the Latin names of fish.' Marshall grew up to become a neuro-ecologist investigating how residents of coral reefs and the deeper ocean perceive their environment.

'As arrogant humans we tend to assume we are the pinnacle of evolution; however, certainly in sensory terms, this is far from true,' he explains in his professional profile. He tells me he works with these creatures 'because I love them'. And, as it happens, they have much to teach. 'The animals I'm working on at the moment are helping us detect cancer, increase data storage on computers and improve satellite design.

All coming directly from mantis shrimp vision.'

The blue-grey surface of the ocean is a formidable barrier. But for Marshall it was always pervious. 'I've lived underwater, done two stints in the Aquarius habitat [a submerged laboratory in the Florida Keys]. I've fallen asleep underwater, which you're not supposed to do.'

On 16 March 2016 he wept underwater. 'It was on my field trip to Lizard Island. I've been going there for 30 years.' Marshall was treading water at ground zero of a global coral bleaching event – only the third ever recorded and the worst by far, all since 1998. To evoke the scene, he guides me on an imaginary walk through the loveliest forest I can conjure. But all the trees have lost their leaves. They are dying or dead and will soon start to fall down. The grasses and flowers are gone. The birds have flown away. Animals desperately search for food.

Marshall's submerged Eden is Lizard Island's Loomis Reef, 270 kilometres north of Cairns on the Great Barrier Reef. Stretching 2300 kilometres up the coast from Bundaberg to the Torres Strait, the Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on the planet, a World Heritage site cherished for its biological diversity.

But Loomis was now a slagheap. Its annihilation had been so swift that the scientist reckoned even the fish, many of them searching out their vanished food gardens, looked traumatised.

'We were diving in dissolving reef,' Marshall says. 'The water had this terrible green ghostly quality – it was like diving in ectoplasm. It was awful. And essentially it was dying coral.' Aerial surveys in April confirmed 93 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef had been hit by the bleaching to some extent.

The northern section, which because of its remoteness had endured as the most pristine, copped it the worst. In 2015, this area of the Reef was credited with saving Australia the indignity of its World Heritage treasure being declared by UNESCO as 'in danger'.

'Australia argued to UNESCO that the outstanding universal value of the World Heritage area is intact because we have this northern 30 per cent of the Reef where everything is hunky dory,' says Professor Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

'That is no longer the case. In the space of a month or two, the northern third is now more degraded than the southern two thirds.' In early May, as Canberra waited for the bell to ring on the federal election campaign, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) chairman, Dr Russell Reichelt, broke the news to a distracted Senate committee that more than half the coral in reefs in the far northern section were dead. He was unequivocal about where the blame lay. This was not the consequence of this summer's whopping El Niño, a natural warming cycle that occurs every five years or so. Bleaching was driven by 'the upward trend in ocean temperatures, which is about 1 degree [Celsius] in the past century ... It is very strongly linked to global warming.' Scientists had been warning about this eventuality for decades. In 1999, Professor Ove Hoegh- Guldberg, one of Marshall's colleagues at the University of Queensland, spelled out the scenario. He plotted the future climate if humans continued to pump out greenhouse gases against the known tolerances of coral biology, and found a wipe-out. Events as shocking as the world's first mass coral...