Sometimes, Mother Nature doesn’t care about her own rules, and that’s when researchers discover a new 600-mile coral reef located at the mouth of the Amazon River.
If you’re wondering what’s wrong with that sentence, let us break it down to you. Coral reefs usually cover the ocean floors, and they almost never live in riverbeds, where the waters get murky and the sunlight cannot shine through.
That’s why it was a complete surprise for a team of Brazilian and American scientists to find this mature reef in the Amazon. It seems to stretch across more than 3,600 square miles and is at a depth of about 30 to 120 meters below the muddy waters.
Unfortunately, the unexpected finding was made at a site already marked for oil explorations. Scientists, the government, and oil companies are still quite flabbergasted about how a huge coral reef like this has gone unnoticed for so long.
Even though reefs generally thrive in sunlit, clear waters, this Amazon reef appears to defy nature and stubbornly live beneath the murkiest of waters – beaming with algae, corals, fish, sponges, and stars alike.
However, the oil plans for the area pose a great threat to the coral reefs. Certain regions have already undergone the start of the exploration for oil; presumably, the Brazilian government has sold roughly 80 blocks of the area at the mouth of the river for this very purpose.
Moreover, it’s possible that 20 of these 80 blocks – 25 percent of the entire area – is already producing oil; this operation might be happening right above the endangered coral reef.
The study’s authors warn about the major environmental challenge caused by such large-scale industrial activities.
“These [exploration] blocks will soon be producing oil in close proximity to the reefs, but the environmental baseline compiled by the companies and the Brazilian government is […] largely based on sparse museum specimens,” they added.
But oil production is not the only threat to the Amazonian reef; industrial fisheries and climatic changes also pose an incredible danger.
And looking at the situation on a global scale, researchers raised a red flag regarding the largest coral reef bleaching on record.
The study discovered the coral reef appears to be home to 73 different species of fish, more than 60 species of sponges, starfish, lobsters, and other reef life.
Each day we find out more about the growing need to protect our fragile marine ecosystems. The details of the newly discovered reef have been featured in the journal Science Advances.
Image Source: Aqua World
