Word: reefs
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Apart from the kangaroo, the koala and other enchanting marsupials, Australia seems short of identity icons. There is, of course, Ayers Rock, the most sublime stone on earth. There is also the incomparable Great Barrier Reef, a single coral organism some 1,250 miles long. We have two famous structures, both in Sydney: the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, the latter a masterpiece by the Danish architect Jorn Utzon. Perched on one of the world's most beautiful sites for a ceremonial building, a headland in Sydney Harbor, and surrounded on three sides by sapphire water, this great building...
...environment. Significant concerns remain over the cost of implementing such a large project. “There is a question of scale, if what we’re trying to do is protect a bay then it is likely feasible, but as you start moving up to the Barrier Reef and ocean, the amounts of mass handling is enormous,” said Ken Caldeira, a global ecology researcher at Stanford...
...Like receding glaciers in the Arctic, coral reefs are a canary in the global-warming coal mine. "They are a sensitive species that are affected first," says C. Mark Eakin, coordinator of the Coral Reef Watch program of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA). Though climate change awareness is up, the public has a short attention span when it comes to ecosystems it can't see. So do policymakers. Bruno says more coral data is being gathered today by NGOs than universities or national programs, particularly in developing nations. But even in the U.S., NOAA's satellite-data...
...That's why he founded Reef Check. Realizing that one man's chore might be another's hobby, Hodgson decided to fill the information gap by enlisting people who would be naturally interested in saving coral: scuba divers. In 1997 he created a global network of volunteer snorkelers and divers, specially trained by scientists to monitor reefs using a standardized checklist. Over the past 10 years, Reef Check's volunteers have amassed a bounty of data on the world's coral. "In the beginning, people were looking down on us, saying 'Oh, you guys are just volunteers,'" Hodgson recalls...
...coral reefs so important? They constitute a vast, global ecosystem of species of plants and fish that people depend on for food as well as tourist revenue; in some areas, healthy reefs help protect the shore from potentially destructive waves. But arguments about biodiversity don't excite people, so Hodgson, who's trying to get coral on the World Conservation Union's threatened-species Red List, likes to point out that several anticancer drugs are derived from reef species. "Maybe one day a coral will save your life," Hodgson tells skeptics. "That gets to people...