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CANBERRA (Reuters) -The Great Barrier Reef should be added to a list of World Heritage Sites that are "in danger", a United Nations panel said on Tuesday, drawing an angry response from Australia, which called the recommendation politically motivated. ...Defending Australia's efforts to protect the reef, Environment Minister Sussan Ley said Canberra would challenge the recommendation, saying some hidden agenda had influenced its findings. ...China chairs the UNESCO committee, but when queried in parliament, Ley declined to say if she was pointing the finger at Beijing. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a government official told Reuters that China had been...

Two Roman Catholic churches burned in Canada and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett proclaims a "new outbreak" of COVID-19 but first... A British court could decide tomorrow whether a gravely ill two year old can be taken to Israel for treatment or be put to death... Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett asking people not to fly overseas and mandating masks at Ben-Gurion International Airport... New coronavirus restrictions rolled out in Moscow... The US government seizing news websites deemed "Pro-Iranian" and "Pro-Hamas (The group ruling in Gaza responsible for attacks on Israel)"... Portland police deciding to end traffic stops for motorists...

The starfish feeds on native coral that call the reef home -- and they are key to the reef's ecology. No coral, no reef and so the starfish must be destroyed. In 2015, researchers at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) unveiled the technology known as the Crown-Of-Thorns Starfish robot (COTSbot) to deal with the threat. When deployed, the autonomous robot was able to seek out crown-of-thorns starfish (with 99 percent accuracy) and inject them with a chemical cocktail that causes them to break out in nasty blisters and eventually die. Now, that same research team has unveiled RangerBot, the...

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.

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 Bramble Cay melomys has become more famous in extinction than it ever was in life. A mouse-like rodent, the melomys amazingly survived on a 3.6 hectare grass-covered cay (a low-lying island in a coral reef) in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef like a ratty Robinson Crusoe for thousands of years. There, it thrived off just a few plant species until human-caused climate change—in the form of rising sea levels and increasing inundations of sea water on the low-lying island—wiped it off the planet. But, while the extinction has been reported widely, articles have missed an important point: the scientists who...

Authorities say a ship leaking oil that ran aground off central Queensland near the Great Barrier Reef should not have been in the area. The Chinese coal carrier Shen Neng One ran aground on Douglas Shoal about 120 kilometres east of Rockhampton late yesterday. The ship had departed from the Port of Gladstone and was bound for China. Early this morning authorities found the hull had been breached and an attempt to refloat the ship was abandoned. At first light planes flew over the area to assess the extent of the slick and found the oil as far as two...

A tropical cyclone (which here in North America would be called a hurricane) is threatening Australia and the Great Barrier Reef. The storm is named KERRY.

Link post (provided to alert interested FR members to the post and images in the FR "chat" section, where any discussion should be posted): Geology Picture of the Week, September 14-20, 2003: The Hellmouth (and more)

Sydney - Australia's Great Barrier Reef - the world's largest chain of living coral - could be devastated by global warming in the next 50 years unless drastic action was taken, a report said on Monday. The Australian Institute of Marine Science and other agencies warned that without tough restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions, sea temperatures could rise to a level that would bleach and kill vast tracts of coral. "The appearance of coral reefs and thus their amenity for tourism may be seriously compromised, and their productivity and biodiversity decimated," the report said. Coral bleaching - when colourful reefs...