Archives for April 2019

WE have been led to believe that smashed coral is our fault – that when it is lying on the sea floor as untidy piles of grey it is because of catastrophic human-caused global warming. But just maybe coral bleaching and cyclones are natural, and not even increasing in extent.

I visited four reefs during my recent adventures off Bowen. One of these, the reef fringing Middle Island, has been very badly damaged by cyclone Debbie, which hovered over Bowen in April 2017.

Just two years later much of this reef is unattractive – but certainly not desolate.

After gearing-up I jumped over-board from The Skipper’s boat with my little red Olympus (TG-5) camera on Monday – and my new snorkelling buddy Matt.

Every time I stopped swimming, watched, and waited I saw something special swim past.

There were also large, colourful parrot fish. But I didn’t manage to capture them on this short video – my first attempt at underwater movie-making.

As I snorkeled sometimes the backdrop was broken coral. Other times I swam over meadows of algae. But I never had to swim far before seeing something special – like a mushroom or staghorn coral. They were often solitary: the very early stages of regeneration at an otherwise often ugly reef.

Occasionally I would stumble on an area of faster growing soft coral with sponges.

That the cyclone had smashed large Porites coral clear in half gives some idea of how powerful it was.

But even delicate black feather corals are coming back … one at a time.

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The first/feature photo is of me (Jennifer Marohasy) getting ready to jump in, with a view across to the north eastern edge of Middle Island, off Bowen, on 22 April 2019; photo credit John Barnes.

The first link embedded into this post is from the Bureau’s website suggesting a declining, certainly not increasing, trend in the incidence of cyclone. I’ve just downloaded this page and am archiving it here: TropicalCycloneTrends-20190424

Also, it should be noted, that the Bureau did overhype the category for Cyclone Marcia, as I detailed in an article for On Line Opinion, also archived here: CycloneMaricawasnotcategory5-Queenslanders . The Bureau were much more accurate when it came to reporting of Cyclone Debbie.

MOST people rarely venture into nature – they certainly don’t spend much time on coral reefs. When they do, they may expect the fish and corals to be as bright, colourful and perfect as the last nature documentary that they saw in full surround-sound on a wide screen.

Such images come from professional photographers staying underwater for hours, perhaps after having waited days for very calm weather, so the water is exceptionally clear. Of course, such photographs are enhanced by bright lighting, so most of the footage would be taken on very sunny days. Also, a great expanse of shallow water – gives depth to the footage, and the further off-shore generally the clearer the water.

The Great Barrier Reef is vast. If you click onto the webpage at this link you will find zoning maps that give an idea of how long and how wide – in fact the area is visible from outer space.

Scroll down and click on Map 9, and you will find a map showing so many reefs off Bowen.

Bowen has made headlines for some years now – it is the place where Terry Hughes and other leading academics claim the reef is totally dead, and that this is representative of the whole inshore Great Barrier Reef. They are so wrong.

There is so much coral here off Bowen, and there are so many extensive areas of coral reef, and most are a very long way off shore – making the visit to just one of the outer reefs a long day trip by fishing boat.

Because cyclones and coral bleaching are a regular occurrence, the exact state of the corals at particular reef is not always predictable and in constant flux. This has been the case for thousands of years.

The Great Barrier Reef has existed for about 10,000 years: when sea levels rose at the beginning of the current geological epoch known as the Holocene. Because the reefs have been growing up-wards for thousands of years – while sea levels have fallen over one metre in the last 5,000 years – they are very vulnerable to bleaching, particularly when there is calm weather on a very low tide leaving corals high and dry for long periods.

Nevertheless, it is possible to find so much healthy coral, even at Bowen … at Horseshoe Bay, which is just around the corner from Queens Bay that is shown in the far-left corner of Map 9.

I’ve been in Bowen for several days now … waiting for the strong south-southeasterly winds to ease so we can take the boat out to visit some off-shore islands. The Skipper did take me out late yesterday (when we had a few hours of calm) to see the coral the other side of Bramston reef – I’m meaning beyond the mud flat and reef flat that I walked last Friday on the very low tide.

It is so wrong for Terry Hughes to suggest that this reef has all been reduced to mud flat. That the coral off Bowen is all dead.

There is live coral, and lots of it, at depth at Bramston reef. I got lots of photographs from my cheap camera and just snorkelling (no tank) and I might post more in due course.

My preference would be to get a professional underwater photographer to take better photographs and as a movie so you can see the full extent of this ancient reef.

Late yesterday some of Bramston reef looked so eerie – then again it is about 4,500 years old.

Someone needs to go down with a good camera and a tank of oxygen and get extensive footage that shows the great diversity, and all the fish – there might even be a crocodile hiding somewhere.

Parts of Bramston reef have been reduced to rubble, some from Cyclone Debbie that hovered over Bowen just two years ago. But there is also new coral, and extensive areas of healthy and live corals at this ancient reef.

I’m hoping to see another ancient reef off Bowen this afternoon … perhaps the Skipper and Matt will take me to Middle Island.

In the meantime, subscribe at my blog, so you are sure to be one of the first to find out when, and if, I can find a professional underwater photographer to show you ancient Bramston reef, including the crocodile.

If you are impatient and overseas, just jump on a plane and then bus or train it to Bowen. Nicole Kidman has even been here, but she thought Bowen was Darwin. Don’t believe Hollywood, the academics or doomsayers (the Elites can be so lame) – there is so much more than mudflats and cowboys at Bowen.

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The feature image is of me, and very happy, because I had just been snorkeling at Horseshoe Bay (Bowen) – and there are so many pretty corals, and I saw a sting ray.

The coral reef off Bowen, in North Queensland, is only dead to the 2,500 marine scientists who attended the conference in Cairns on 9th July 2012. That day, they were shown photographs of a mudflat … and told that mud now covers what was once healthy coral reef, and that this reef off Bowen is an example of the “sad decline” of the Great Barrier Reef.

The photographs shown by Terry Hughes on that day were misleading.

There is still a lot of coral off Bowen. At Bramston Reef it is more than one kilometre off shore, beyond the mudflat, and beyond the reef flat – both of which are teeming with life.

This is the littoral zone: the area between the highest and lowest tides once of so much interest to biologists. But like so much of our natural history it is being denied by the doomsayers and activists who now manage the narrative and seem completely averse to a bit of mud. They seem to expect the entire shoreline to be covered in bright corals with Nemo swimming around, but this was never the case.

Yesterday, on the very lowest tide of this month, I walked across an expanse of mudflat and then sandy reef flat before finding myself blocked by Acropora coral, which would normally be underwater. I could see massive Porites just out of the water in the distance. But the tide was turning, and so I headed back.

I took photographs along the way of the many creatures that inhabit this littoral zone – that is not all covered in mud, but some of it is and that is not bad.

For years, photographs of just the mud flat with a view across to Gloucester Island (with Stone Island to the left in the foreground, of the next video), have been paraded as evidence of “devastated coral reefs” – including by Terry Hughes at that conference.

The photographs are just of the naturally muddy, what some would call “back reef”. Beyond that is an area of perhaps 900 metres dominated by coarse carbonate sands, and beyond that corals for perhaps 800 metres to the seafloor. Yesterday I walked across the mud flat and reef flat to the corals.

The most high-profile Great Barrier Reef researchers have denied the existence of the reef flat and then the corals at Bramston reef, which they variously confuse with the fringing reef at Stone Island. It is a shame. It suggests a high level of incompetence.

Bramston reef was probably at its most expansive and spectacular about 4,500 years ago when sea levels were about 1.5 metres higher (yes, higher). That was during the Holocene high stand.

Back then there would have been rapid vertical growth of the reef. By 3,000 years before the present, the reef was probably backfilling with the sea-level fall creating fossil microatolls.

That there is limited potential for vertical growth at present, has everything to do with the lack of sea level rise. Sea levels did come up over 100 meters between about 16,000 and 10,000 years ago! The climate is always changing. Indeed climate change began long before the industrial revolution.

It is confusing to me that while sea level fall is an un-controversial fact in the technical literature, there is so much concern about the perhaps 36 cm rise since about 1880 along the Queensland coast. Indeed, what is written in the newspapers is impossible to reconcile with what is in the technical, scientific literature. This is often the case with climate issues.

At Bramston reef the difference between high and low tide at this time of year is more than three metres. There will be much more coral exposed in August, when we get the very lowest tides for this part of the Earth for this year – and I’m planning to return then, to get more photographs, including of the corals.

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The feature image (very first photograph, at top) is of a young Porites coral growing around mud on the reef flat taken by Jennifer Marohasy on 19th April 2019.