© AFP-JIJI
A turtle swims over bleached coral at Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef.
Australia's Great Barrier Reef is suffering its worst coral bleaching in recorded history with 93 percent of the World Heritage site affected, scientists said Wednesday, as they revealed the phenomenon is also hitting the other side of the country.
After extensive aerial and underwater surveys, researchers at James Cook University said only 7 percent of the huge reef had escaped the whitening triggered by warmer water temperatures.
"We've never seen anything like this scale of bleaching before," said Terry Hughes, convenor of the National Coral Bleaching Task Force.
The damage ranges from minor in the southern areas — which are expected to recover soon — to very severe in the northern and most pristine reaches of the 2,300-km-long (1,430-mile-long) site off the east coast.
Hughes said of the 911 individual reefs surveyed, only 68 (or 7 percent) had escaped the massive bleaching event which has also spread south to Sydney Harbor for the first time and across to the west.
Researcher Verena Schoepf, from the University of Western Australia, said coral is already dying at a site she had recently visited off the state's far north coast.
"Some of the sites that I work at had really very severe bleaching, up to 80 to 90 percent of the coral bleached," she said. "So it's pretty bad out there."
Australian Environment Minister Greg Hunt said it is
"absolutely clear that there is a severe coral bleaching event occurring not just in the Great Barrier Reef but throughout many parts of the Pacific."
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