A warm water coral reef provides the latest evidence that coral bleaching events occur with some regularity, and that there is always a reef recovery, no matter how severe the bleaching.
A team of 15 researchers analyzed extracted coral reef cores from the equatorial Pacific's Jarvis Island.
The evidence they gathered indicates bleaching events were even taking place early in the 20th century, and that there appears to be a periodic 5-year repeat of the coral bleaching.
Per a review of the peer-reviewed study:
"In contemplating the above findings, Barkley et al. say that their historical bleaching reconstruction "reveals a coral reef community that has bleached frequently, and at times catastrophically, yet appears to have maintained a healthy state over time."..."Barkley et al. note that "the record implies that the Jarvis coral community has bleached with varying degrees of severity every five years, on average"....while...."it was ranked among the healthiest of all ocean ecosystems, notwithstanding it has experienced repeated episodes of moderate to severe bleaching every five years."
"According to the authors, recurring bleaching events were also identified prior to the six decades of time focused on in their study (1960-2016). As noted, Barkley et al. report that "two cores extend back to the turn of the 20th century, and the earliest stress bands appear in these cores in 1912, indicating that bleaching occurred on Jarvis over 100 years ago."
"And, it suggests rising atmospheric CO2 and rising ocean temperatures over the course of the past century have had no measurable impact on either the frequency or severity of El Niño warming events."
Prior articles debunking predicted specie extinction myths