We know that coral reefs are extremely important for marine biodiversity. They house a quarter of all marine species and provide food, livelihoods, security and recreation for at least a billion people.
But one thing which isn’t fully understood yet is why some patches of coral in the south Atlantic Ocean have shown to be more
resistant to climate change.
The
Allen Coral Atlas project (ACA) which was created by the late Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, has set out to solve these mysteries, so that policies to protect the world’s coral reefs can be better informed.
Allen, who was a keen scuba diver himself, sadly died in 2018, but his legacy lives on in the ACA. “As a technologist, [Allen] saw tremendous data gaps and challenged us to figure out how to apply the emerging availability of satellite imagery to map and monitor the world’s coral reefs. All of them,” says Paulina Gerstner, the Allen Coral Atlas Program Manager.
Crean un atlas para monitorear desde el espacio todos los arrecifes de coral de la Tierra
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Plan para monitorear desde el espacio los arrecifes de coral
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The plan to map every coral reef on Earth – from space
Photo by Hoodh Ahmed/ Unsplash / 07 Jan 2021
In October 2020, Australian scientists found a detached coral reef skyscraper on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef nearly 500 meters tall and 1.5 kilometres wide that exceeds the height of the Eiffel Tower and New York’s Empire State Building. This was the first discovery of its kind in 120 years.
It also signals a challenge – that we know relatively little about what lies underwater, given the high costs and still-nascent technology of ocean exploration.
To better understand the mysteries of the world’s oceans, a team of scientists is using satellite imaging to map out, in unprecedented detail, one of the planet’s most iconic underwater ecosystems: the shallow coral reef.