OCEAN DYING FASTER THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT

A one-two punch of bleaching from record hot water followed by disease has killed ancient and delicate coral in the biggest loss of reefs scientists have ever seen in Caribbean waters.
Early conservative estimates from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands find that about one-third of the coral in monitoring sites has recently died.
"It's an unprecedented die-off," said National Park Services fisheries biologist Jeff Miller. "The mortality that we're seeing now is of the extremely slow-growing reef-building corals. These are corals that are the foundation of the reef. We're talking colonies that were here when Columbus came by have died in the past three to four months."
Some of the devastated coral can never be replaced because it only grows the width of one dime a year, Miller said.
I remember when I took up scuba diving 2 years ago the fear of dying reefs were thought to be over a period of thirty years or so, which seemed bad enough.
On Sunday, Hernandez-Delgado found a colony of 800-year old star coral -- more than 13 feet high -- that had just died in the waters off Puerto Rico.
Some scientists blame global warming for this unprecedented phenomenon. "This is probably a harbinger of things to come ," said John Rollino, the chief scientist for the Bahamian Reef Survey. It seems many of the effects of global warming are happening much faster than was anticipated. It reminds me of the movie "The Day After Tommorrow", where effects of global warming that were anticipated to happen in terms of many decades but ended up happening over a span of months.