NASA takes 23,000-foot view of the world’s coral reefs

COCONUT ISLAND, Oahu — Coral reefs have almost always been studied up close, by scientists in the water looking at small portions of reefs to gather data and knowledge about the larger ecosystems.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is taking a step back and getting a wider view, from about 23,000 feet above. NASA and top scientists from around the world launched a three-year campaign Thursday to gather new data on coral reefs like never before.

Using specially designed instruments mounted on high-flying aircraft, the scientists plan to map large swaths of coral around the world in hopes of better understanding how environmental changes such as global warming, acidification and pollution are affecting these delicate and important ecosystems.

“The idea is to get a new perspective on coral reefs from above, to study them at a larger scale than we have been able to before, and then relate reef condition to the environment,” said Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences’ Eric Hochberg, who is principal investigator for the project, called the Coral Reef Airborne Laboratory, or CORAL.

Hochberg and the project’s lead NASA scientist, Michelle Gierach, were in Oahu’s Kaneohe Bay with The Associated Press on Tuesday to gather baseline data in the water.

While the primary science will be conducted using instruments that create detailed images of the sea floor from above, the team also must take baseline measurements in the ocean to validate the data, Gierach said.

Coral reefs drive many tourist economies around the world, but they provide much more than pretty places to dive and snorkel, Gierach said. Reefs are critical habitat for the majority of the fish that people consume and also protect shorelines from dangerous storm surges and rising ocean levels.

Recently, scientists have developed pharmaceutical applications from coral reefs, including painkillers that are not habit-forming, Hochberg said.

“Just realizing that though you may not see a coral, that you may not have your backyard be within this beautiful environment that we’re in right now, corals are impacting you, they are globally important,” Gierach said. “We have to understand how they’re changing so we can make some managed decisions about their future.”

Reefs are among the first ecosystems to be dramatically and directly affected by global warming, according to researchers.

The International Society for Reef Studies Consensus Statement, published in 2015, said up to 50 percent of coral reefs have been “largely or completely degraded by a combination of local factors and global climate change” over the past few decades.

Julia Baum, assistant professor of biology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, has done extensive research on coral reefs and said the data gathered from this kind of project could prove highly valuable for international reef scientists and the conservation community.

Baum said coral reef science has been limited by the lack of broad data sets like this project plans to provide and that the research could complement information collected in the water if it’s made openly available to the scientific community. CORAL researchers said all data will be made public.

“As scientific divers, we’re limited by the depth we can work at and the amount of bottom time that we have while we’re diving, so much of underwater marine science, especially on coral reefs, is a painstakingly slow process,” she said.

The CORAL team will study the reefs of Hawaii, Palau, the Mariana Islands, and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef over the next three years.