(p. 12) The exquisite beauty of the more than 200 species of coral, living in crystal clear waters of the northern Red Sea in temperatures that can top 85 degrees Fahrenheit, has made the area a scuba diver’s paradise. Throughout the two-week climate meeting, conference attendees — including John Kerry, the United States climate envoy — took a break from the conference halls to experience the corals for themselves.
. . .
In the northern Red Sea, however, corals can withstand temperatures as much as 7 degrees Celsius above the summer maximum, said Maoz Fine, a marine biologist and Red Sea coral reef expert at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“This is very good news,” Dr. Fine said.
. . .
Red Sea corals may be uniquely suited to survive warming waters because they evolved in an extreme environment that is hotter than where most of the world’s other corals live.
A leading theory about why these coral populations are so resilient suggests that around 10,000 years ago, after the ice age, coral larvae entering the Red Sea from the Indian Ocean had to pass through a barrier of extremely warm water at the sea’s southern entrance, the Bab al-Mandeb Strait.
This barrier acted as a filter, eliminating coral that could not handle high temperatures, said Eslam Osman, a researcher at the Red Sea Research Center at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.
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(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 19, 2022, and has the title “The Red Sea’s Coral Reefs Defy the Climate-Change Odds.”)