Saudi Arabia is planning to build a futuristic megacity on the edge of its waters. Populations along the Red Sea in Israel, Egypt and Jordan are expected to surge. Threats to the reef will accumulate in the decades ahead. “Everything is a challenge in this region,” Fine says. Gathering scientists from across the region to mount a research expedition at different points in the reef, for example, has been hampered by Saudi Arabia’s reluctance to allow Israeli scientists in its territorial waters. Progress is being slowed by lack of funds and shutdowns and travel restrictions as a result of the coronavirus, but also the region’s tense politics. “We don’t really know what is going on biologically that allows these corals to thrive with temperature disruptions that are killing coral in other places,” Kleinhaus says.

Research into the Red Sea corals is still in its early stages. The problem is that scientifically assisted evolution still takes time, and reefs are being pummelled by heat waves at an accelerating rate. “A few species survive, but they’re not happy, and many of them die.”Īnother possibility is figuring out exactly how Red Sea corals survive extreme conditions, and then steering the evolution of species elsewhere to select for those qualities. “The salinity of the water and the ecosystem of microbes is different,” he says. Transplanting hardy coral species to other reefs has not generally worked in the past, says Meibom. The implications for coral reefs elsewhere in the world are still being studied. Many of the coral species that inhabit the Red Sea reef today were forged by that migration, scientists believe, and can survive, and even flourish, in ocean temperatures hotter than those forecast in the decades ahead. “Only those who could withstand the very high salinity and temperatures could move north and colonise,” Kleinhaus says. The coral species that made the arduous journey north through the Red Sea underwent generations of evolutionary selection. When the ice caps melted, the strait reappeared, and plant and animal life flooded back. “It got super hot, super salty and just about everything died,” says Karine Kleinhaus, a professor of marine science at Stony Brook University in New York. More than 2.5m years ago, during the last ice age, the strait receded, cutting off the Red Sea and rendering it inhospitable. The Red Sea feeds into the Indian Ocean through a shallow strait between Djibouti and Yemen about 30km wide. Persuading at least four Middle Eastern governments – not all of whom recognise each other’s existence – to work together. Protecting the reef from other threats such as pollution and overpopulation will require one thing above all, the scientists say. “This is the only coral reef ecosystem that has a chance to withstand the two-to-three degrees of extra heat that we’ll now unavoidably have by the end of the century.” “We realised, holy shit, we have an unbelievable situation,” Meibom says. A growing body of research from across the region is leading marine scientists to a compelling possibility: that a large range of corals along the 4,000km Red Sea reef are uniquely resistant to the climate crisis.

Despite ocean-surface temperatures in the area warming at the same rate as elsewhere, coral species there have never suffered a documented bleaching event. Their results confirmed years of reports from divers in the Gulf of Aqaba and northern Red Sea. To protect the Red Sea reefs, countries including Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt will have to coordinate efforts. “At first we weren’t so sure we were doing everything right, experimentally.” “They even showed improved physiological performance at higher temperatures,” says Maoz Fine, the professor of marine science who led the research. Yet the coral in the experiment at the University of Eilat survived, even as temperatures were raised to five, then six, then seven degrees.

Half the world’s coral reefs are thought to have died in the past three decades, and up to 90% of existing coral reefs may die by the middle of the century, according to research from February. The loss of colour – the result of an expulsion of the microscopic algae that sustains the creatures – is a vivid sign that corals have become severely vulnerable to further heat and disease. Coral reefs, some of the world’s richest environments, are regularly undergoing mass “bleaching” as a result of abnormally high ocean-surface temperatures and increased acidification, both consequences of global heating. Scientists have discovered that a large range of corals in the Red Sea could be resistant to the climate crisisĬoral science in past years has become the study of an ecosystem in freefall.

Red sea coral reef