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The Philippines accused the China Coast Guard of blocking a Filipino supply vessel and damaging it with water cannon on Saturday morning (Mar 23) off a remote and contested South China Sea reef. The Philippine military said the nearly hour-long attack occurred off Second Thomas Shoal, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannon and collided with Filipino vessels in similar stand-offs in recent months. The military released video clips that showed a white ship repeatedly dousing another vessel sailing alongside it with a water cannon. One clip showed two white ships simultaneously firing water at the same vessel.

Curtin University researchers and international collaborators using advanced satellite imagery have discovered an ancient reef-like landform "hidden" in plain view on the Nullarbor Plain, which has been preserved for millions of years since it first formed when the Plain was underwater. Research author Dr. Milo Barham, from the Timescales of Mineral Systems Group within Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the finding further challenged the understanding that the Nullarbor Plain, which emerged from the ocean about 14 million years ago, was essentially flat and featureless. "Unlike many parts of the world, large areas of the Nullarbor Plain have...

Two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia recorded the highest amount of coral cover in nearly four decades, though the reef is still vulnerable to climate change and mass bleaching, a monitoring group said Thursday. The northern and central parts of the UNESCO world heritage-listed reef have experienced some recovery while the southern region has seen a loss of coral cover due to crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks, according to a report by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, a government agency. AIMS CEO Paul Hardisty said that while the coral in the north and central regions was a sign the...

The annual data on coral cover for the Great Barrier Reef, produced by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, was released on Monday showing the amount of coral on the reef is at record high levels. Record high, despite all the doom stories by our reef science and management institutions. Like all other data on the reef, this shows it is in robust health. For example, coral growth rates have, if anything, increased over the past 100 years, and measurements of farm pesticides reaching the reef show levels so low that they cannot be detected with the most ultra-sensitive equipment....

I use the Bing engine to avoid using Google. It's far less offensive than Google but it still is stricken with Wokeness too. The=y have history tidbits and this is what they have for today: "Captain James Cook makes an accidental discovery English explorer Captain James Cook's ship runs aground off the coast of Australia, in the world's largest coral reef system. The Great Barrier Reef was already well-known to the Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples." Really? did the Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples explored and map the the reef? Did they produce charts or any...

While not disagreeing there was work to be done on the reef’s health, McKenzie accused Hughes of exaggerating the damage, which he said has been detrimental to the region’s multibillion-dollar tourism industry. “I think Terry Hughes is a dick,” he told Guardian Australia. “I believe he has done tens of millions of dollars of damage to our reef in our key markets, being America and Europe. You went to those areas in 2017 and they were convinced the reef was dead. And people won’t do long-haul trips when they think the reef is dead.” McKenzie said in 2016, tourism growth...

Dead and dying are two very different things. If a person is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, their loved ones don't rush to write an obituary and plan a funeral. Likewise, species aren't declared extinct until they actually are. In a viral article entitled "Obituary: Great Barrier Reef (25 Million BC-2016)," however, writer Rowan Jacobsen proclaimed ― inaccurately and, we can only hope, hyperbolically ― that Earth's largest living structure is dead and gone.

From the “global warming and ocean acidification will kill everything, forever” and the “nature always finds a way” department comes this inconvenient truth.Back From The Dead: Giant Coral Reef That ‘Died’ In 2003 Teeming With Life Again In 2003, researchers declared Coral Castles dead. On the floor of a remote island lagoon halfway between Hawaii and Fiji, the giant reef site had been devastated by unusually warm water. Its remains looked like a pile of drab dinner plates tossed into the sea. Research dives in 2009 and 2012 had shown little improvement in the coral colonies.Then in 2015, a team of...

Great Barrier Reef tourist operators found less than 5 percent of the natural wonder has died off from “bleaching,” despite claims from scientists that most of the reef had been killed off by the effects of global warming. “Scientists had written off that entire northern section as a complete white-out,’’ Chris Eade, owner of the diving boat Spirit Of Freedom, told The Courier-Mail in an interview. “We expected the worst,” Eade said. “But it is tremendous condition, most of it is pristine, the rest is in full recovery. It shows the resilience of the reef.” Eade said dire predictions about...

The speed and scale of China’s island-building spree have alarmed other countries with interests in the region. China announced in June that the creation of islands — moving sediment from the seafloor to a reef — would soon be completed. Since then, China has focused its efforts on construction. So far the country has built port facilities, military buildings and an airstrip on the islands, and recent imagery shows evidence of two more airstrips under construction. The installations bolster China’s foothold in the Spratly Islands, a disputed scattering of reefs and islands in the South China Sea more than 500...

YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, Japan — The U.S. government faces a $1.4 million fine for damage caused to a Philippines national park when the minesweeper USS Guardian ran aground on a coral reef in January, Philippine officials said Monday. The fine total, converted from 58.4 million Philippine pesos, is based on a 2009 law detailing fines based on total area damaged, unauthorized entry and other violations. A statement from Tubbataha Reefs National Park superintendent Angelique Songco called the fine just a “slap on the wrist.” “However, we respect the rule of law, and this is the fine stipulated,” Songco said in...

My countdown continues. Some people just love one-sided stories. Unfortunately, for the chattering classes, I’m not one of them. From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “7:3o report” (6/7/1999): Global warming will destroy Great Barrier Reef: report MAXINE McKEW: Well, it’s said that coral reefs are like the canary in the coalmine, warning of impending doom and dying in the process. So when the world’s reefs last year suffered severe coral bleaching on an unprecedented scale, scientists and environmentalists were alarmed. As a result, Greenpeace commissioned one of the world's leading reef biologists to find out what caused the dramatic coral decay....

Belize said Jeff Greene's yacht damaged a coral reef, racking up $1.87 million in unpaid fines.On a Tuesday morning five years ago, Summerwind, a three-story, 145-foot luxury yacht, maneuvered above the celebrated barrier reef that lines the coast of Belize. There it dropped anchor -- and plunged into controversy over severe damage to a coral reef system officially recognized by the United Nations as one of the world's most magnificent and irreplaceable treasures. ``The guys from the area told me they were beside the boat before it dropped anchor, and they were yelling and waving their hands, shouting, `No! No,...

What do you do with a 523-foot rusty warship that's outlived its time? In the case of the USNS Vandenberg, you sink it, reports CBS News correspondent Kelly Cobiella. In its heyday in the 1960s, the Vandenberg watched space launches, and spied on Russia. "It helped with the Cold War - it fought as hard as anyone," said veteran Mac Monroe. Before long it'll be an artificial reef, an underwater playground for divers and fish. "This is the best wreck dive in the world you can drive to," said dive boat captain Joe Weatherby. "That's a fact."

Live video feed from Key West of the sinking of former USNS Vandenberg to form an artificial reef

The jury is still out on whether Dubai’s offshore reclamation projects are a sound ecological addition to the Gulf, say world experts studying new artificial reefs at the mega-billion dollar developments. However, in interviews on Tuesday near the trunk of the Jebel Ali Palm, marine scientists said early data is promising - new coral is growing on the windward outer reaches of breakwaters erected around Nakheel’s Palm Trilogy and The World. The comments from experts with the United Nations University International Network on Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) came as a two-day coastal monitoring workshop wrapped up in Dubai. United...

“For some reason, when you put people next to reefs, they die,” said microbiologist Forest Rohwer of San Diego State University at a recent symposium at the American Museum of Natural History here. A 2004 study found that 70 percent of the world’s reefs had been destroyed or were threatened

When death strikes a coral reef, whether from an oil spill off Mexico or sediment unleashed by a dam bursting in Hawaii, marine biologists at the scene know what to look for, but not how to report and preserve their findings so they will hold up in court. Not for long. Biologists and criminalists are joining forces to develop specific crime scene investigation techniques that work under water, where almost nothing that is standard procedure on land works. Call it "CSI: Coral Reef." "The coral reef is the body," said Ken Goddard, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service...

Stuck on a reef 07apr06 How many times must the experts be wrong about Barrier Reef devastation before we disbelieve their scares? HOW many times must the Great Barrier Reef "survive" before we figure it's not really dying? Actually, the real question is a bit ruder. As in: How many times can global-warming alarmists such as Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg be wrong about the reef's "devastation" before we learn to ignore their scares? The trouble is our reef is so well-loved that green militants, desperate that we back their theory of man-made global warming, consider it the perfect hostage. No month...

Marine Organisms Threatened By Increasingly Acidic Ocean Corals and Plankton May Have Difficulty Making Shells Every day, the average person on the planet burns enough fossil fuel to emit 24 pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, out of which about nine pounds is then taken up by the ocean. As this CO2 combines with seawater, it forms an acid in a process known as ocean acidification. A new study by an international team of oceanographers published in the September 29, 2005 issue of Nature reports that ocean acidification could result in corrosive chemical conditions much sooner than previously thought....