Potential climate change impacts on corals and coral reefs in Melanesia from bleaching events and ocean acidification

Abstract

The world’s atmosphere is undergoing changes that are unprecedented in the postglacial period of the last 10,000 years that are apparently related to the emissions which began increasing with industrial development in the mid 19th century. Although it is only one of a suite of “greenhouse gases” that have increased dramatically in the last 150 years, CO2 (carbon dioxide) is the most pervasive and most studied. Continuous measurements of this compound, a natural component of the earth’s atmosphere, at the Mauna Loa observatory on the island of Hawaii since 1958 has shown a steady increase from an annual average of about 315 ppm to about 380 ppm in 2005