A Wild Idea to Protect the Great Barrier Reef
Imagine this: It’s the year 2033, and the government agency that manages Australia’s Great Barrier Reef learns of intensifying heat in the Pacific Ocean. A tongue of water, its high temperature represented as dark red in satellite imagery, is moving westward from the tropical Pacific. From the United States, NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch issues a high alert for mass bleaching throughout the Great Barrier Reef. The oncoming heat could sear the corals that have built the 3,000 reefs that comprise the world’s most massive biological structure on Earth, turn them ghostly white, and destroy the abundant life they support. It could be catastrophic. It has been before.
But unlike in the past, people responsible for the Great Barrier Reef’s health need not sit idly by as the corals turn skeletal. They have what used to be a controversial tool at their disposal.
About a month before the heat wave arrives, a fleet of hundreds of ships sets sail. Bolted onto
