By Kate McIntosh
If you parted the Red Sea, it may be more difficult to walk across than you thought. The first steps would likely be the sharpest, as you stumbled across a flourishing coral reef more than 5,000 years old. Envisioning 1,240 miles of vibrant coastal reef smack dab in the desert regions of Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen can be difficult, and perhaps that’s why nearly all artistic interpretations of the Israelite Exodus portray a smooth, sandy highway dimidiating a raging sea. It would be a miracle if their sandals survived even the first several hundred feet of the calcium carbonate jungle.
In a time when climate change threatens to make myths of our planet’s coral reefs, the fringing reefs of the northern Red Sea remain relatively unfazed. Making their home in one of the warmest, saltiest bodies of water in the world, different species of corals and zooxanthellae (microscopic algae) have evolved to survive conditions that would normally be a death sentence to tropical coral reefs (Mandel). In the last 20 years, reefs such as the Great Barrier Reef have experienced four catastrophic bleaching events, while northern Red Sea reefs have no mass bleaching events to report (Knaus). Even during the disastrous El Niño-induced heating of 2015-2016, though northern waters were significantly warmer, bleaching only happened in the central and southern Red Sea (Keim).
"We're looking here at a population of corals on a reef that is very resilient to high temperature changes,” explains Fine Moaz, Assistant Professor of Marine Sciences at Israel’s Bar-llan University. “It is most likely going to be the last to survive in a world undergoing very significant warming and acidification of seawater” (Mandel). While some scientists are trying to save reefs by breeding the most resilient corals in laboratories and then replanting them in the ocean, scientists working to protect the Red Sea coral reefs are faced with more immediate threats such as overfishing, maritime traffic, and tourism. Eslam Osman, a marine biologist at the University of Essex, warns that though we are lucky to have such a resistant, continuous reef system on our planet, we should not take it for granted. As coral reefs across the globe face bleaching and extinction, the northern Red Sea may one day be a refugia, a vivid and bittersweet reminder of what oceans can hopefully be again if global warming somehow slows and reverses its course.
Cave, Damien, and Justin Gillis. “Building a Better Coral Reef.” The New York Times, 20 Sept.
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Keim, Brandon. “The Amazing Coral Reefs That Can Survive Climate Change.” Anthropocene,
Knaus, Christopher, and Nick Evershed. “Great Barrier Reef at 'Terminal Stage': Scientists
Despair at Latest Coral Bleaching Data.” The Guardian, 17 Apr. 2017,
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Mandel, Jonah. “In the Red Sea, Coral Reefs Can Take the Heat of Climate Change.” Phys.org,
21 June 2017, phys.org/news/2017-06-red-sea-coral-reefs-climate.html.
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