Rare 20 Million Years Old Reef Bigger Than The Empire State Building Discovered Underwater In Australia
|Cynthia McKanzie – MessageToEagle.com – While mapping Australia’s oceans, researchers discovered a giant 20 million years old reef. It’s a truly amazing and rare discovery because it’s the first to be discovered in more than 120 years.
The detached reef located in the waters off Cape York in North Queensland is huge! Scientists say it sits among a cluster of seven other detached reefs and it’s bigger than the Empire State building. It’s as tall as a skyscraper, or if you want numbers it’s about 1.5 kilometers long, and rises from over 500 meters deep up to 40 meters below the surface.
Credit: Schmidt Ocean Institute
A “detached” reef refers to a reef bedded to the ocean floor and not part of the main body of the Great Barrier Reef.
“When we got to the crest of it — it’s only about 300 by 50 meters wide — we found a lot of fish and a healthy shark population too,” research leader Robin Beaman from James Cook University (JCU) told ABC News.
Scientists who made this discovery are working onboard the research vessel “Falkor”. Using an underwater robot called “SuBastian that has a remotely controlled arm they have successfully collected samples from the ocean floor.
“As a collective over the entire [12-month] expedition, we’ve been finding a whole lot of new species.”
Scientists hope they have also discovered new species. Credit: Schmidt Ocean Institute
It’s going to take time for us to work through the imagery and samples we’ve collected before we can say if there are new species [at this reef] or not,” Dr Beaman said.
This incredible discovery comes just a few days after the publication of findings that since 1995 half the corals on the Great Barrier Reef have died due to climate change induced coral bleaching.
Scientists emphasize the importance of exploring our undersea environment, so that we can protect it.
Reef scientist Terry Hughes from James Cook University thinks it is an interesting discovery, but shallower corals will vanish unless we act now.
“Many corals are shallow water specialists and others are deep water specialists and only a few have a broader depth range. There are corals that you only find shallower than five metres [and] there are other corals you only find deeper than 30.
We still have an opportunity to save the reef if we deal with climate change. 1.1 degrees of warming so far has triggered five bleaching events since 1998 [but] we still have half a reef.”
What [warming] stabilizes at will be critical. 1.5 to 2 C is doable, but the mix of species will be different. It already is.
If we go to 3 or 4C it will be a pretty sad state of affairs,” Professor Hughes said.
Did you know the Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth? Stretching for 1,429 miles (2,000 kilometers) over an area of approximately 133,000 square miles, the Great Barrier Reef is also the largest coral reef system in the world.
Great Barrier Reef as seen from space. Credit: NASA
The reef is located off the coast of Queensland, Australia, in the Coral Sea and is visible from outer space.
The Great Barrier Reef is the size of 70 million football fields!
It contains thousands of reefs and hundreds of islands and it is believed to be as much as 20,000,000 years old!
Can we really afford to lose such a magnificent, old, and enormous structure? Surely it must be worth protecting!
Written by Cynthia McKanzie – MessageToEagle.com Staff Writer