"Coral reef loss at unprecedented levels"

By Paul Eccleston / from the UK's telegraph

Pacific coral reefs are dying at an unprecedented rate, scientists have found. Almost 600 square miles of reef have disappeared every year since the late 1960s - twice the rate of rainforest loss.

Coral loss had become a global phenomenon caused mainly by climate change, rising sea temperatures and man-made nutrient pollution.

The study's lead author, John Bruno, said: "We have already lost half of the world's reef-building corals."

The results of the study in the central and western Pacific are published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE. It provides the first regional-scale and long-term analysis of coral loss in the region where relatively little was known about patterns of reef loss.

The Indo-Pacific contains 75 per cent of the world's coral reefs and has the highest coral diversity in the world. High coral cover reefs in the Indo-Pacific ocean were common until a few decades ago, researchers found.

The study, which analysed a database of 6,000 quantitative surveys performed between 1968 and 2004 of more than 2,600 Indo-Pacific coral reefs revealed that reefs are disappearing at a rate of one per cent a year, a decline that began decades earlier than expected.

Historically, coral cover, a measure of reef health, hovered around 50 per cent. Today, only about two per cent of reefs in the Indo-Pacific have coral cover close to the historical baseline.