Idea or model
Climate change and living things
Warming is moving species ranges: a 2003 analysis found shifts toward the poles averaging 6.1 km per decade and spring events arriving 2.3 days earlier per decade.
Coral bleaching
When water is too warm, corals expel the algae living in their tissues and turn white. Record heat in 2015 and 2016 caused the third global bleaching event since the 1980s.Source: NOAASource: Hughes et al., 2017
Also called coral reefs.
Process
How Coral bleaching connects
Coral bleaching can be caused by
Coral bleaching is related to
Level of life
Ecosystem
A community of living things together with its physical environment, linked by flows of energy and nutrients.
Studied in
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Sources & further reading
The explanations on this page are our own summaries of these sources. Follow a link to read the original; if anything here disagrees with it, the original wins. How we choose and check sources.
What is coral bleaching? (opens the original in a new tab)
NOAA National Ocean Service. oceanservice.noaa.gov. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Fact sheetGovernment sourceGlobal warming and recurrent mass bleaching of corals (opens the original in a new tab)
Hughes TP, Kerry JT, Álvarez-Noriega M, et al. (2017). Nature 543:373-377.
Peer-reviewedPrimary research