The Great Barrier Reef

Australia's Great Barrier Reef hit by 'worst' bleaching

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is 345,000 square kilometres in size, five times the size of Tasmania or larger that the United Kingdom and Ireland combined!

The reef is immensely diverse. It is home to more than 1,500 species of fish, 411 types of hard coral, one-third of the world’s soft corals, 134 species of sharks and rays, six of the world’s seven species of threatened marine turtles, and more than 30 species of marine mammals, including the vulnerable dugong.

Half of the Great Barrier Reef is “dead or dying” and almost all of it is on the brink of extinction, scientists have warned in one of the bleakest assessments of the health of the world's biggest living ecosystem. Climate change is leading the reef to undergo a “significant” event that threatens its existence, according to Australian ministers. Only seven per cent of the reef has escaped “bleaching”, which happens when the water warms and leads the coral to expel the algae that lives inside of it, turning it white. If temperatures don’t drop, then the coral will not be able to recover and it will die.

HOW IS THIS HAPPENING?!?!?!??!?! 

This makes me so so sad. I think Im going to work for wwf after university, and be their illustrator and help all of the animals all over the world.