Great Barrier Reef among the Australian flood victims

News4jax -

Armed with water samples and historical flood data, Australian researchers are warning that the massive flooding in Queensland State is also impacting a neighbor: the Great Barrier Reef.

Already a huge pile of sediment has been dumped by the Burdekin River into waters at the southern end of the massive reef.

Besides top soil, that sediment contains pesticides and fertilizers. The combined effect of all that outflow could be dead coral.

"Our work has shown that high levels of nutrients and sediments can reduce coral diversity and increase the cover of seaweeds on inshore reefs," Katharina Fabricius, a researcher at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, told msnbc.com.

While the flooding across Queensland is the worst in 50 years due to multiple rivers overflowing and some 40 communities swamped, the specific flooding along the Burdekin is not even the worst there in recent years. "The two floods in 2009 and 2008 were among the largest ones on record," Fabricius said.

A team from the institute will be going out to part of the reef next week to check for impacts, she added, noting that the river on average carries more than three million tons of sediments into the reef every year — much of it soil eroded by cattle grazing along the river.

A NASA satellite image of the area on Jan. 4 "shows nicely how the sediment drops out — to be resuspended again on windy days, reducing water clarity — and how the nutrients are leading to algae blooms (water changes from brown to green)," Fabricius said.

Read more...

Posted via http://batavia08.posterous.com batavia08's posterous