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China News Service, Beijing, August 8 (Reporter Sun Zifa) A recent climate change research paper published in the international academic journal Nature shows that the water temperature in and around Australia's Great Barrier Reef in the past 10 years has been the hottest in 400 years.

The authors of the paper believe that this record-breaking warming period in Great Barrier Reef temperatures has increased the risk of mass coral bleaching and mortality, and is likely caused by human-induced climate change.

Bleached corals on the Great Barrier Reef in 2024. Photo courtesy Springer Nature

The paper introduces that the Great Barrier Reef has a diverse ecological network and has experienced a series of large-scale coral bleaching events in recent years. The frequency of these events has been increasing since the first records in the 1980s. Large-scale coral bleaching can be caused by rising water temperatures associated with global warming. Before this, the analysis of sea surface temperature in the Coral Sea (including the Great Barrier Reef) was mainly limited to recent instrumental observations.

In this study, the first author and corresponding author of the paper, Benjamin J. Henley of the University of Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues and collaborators used coral skeleton samples in and around the Coral Sea to reconstruct sea surface temperature data from 1618 to 1995, and combined this data set with sea surface temperature records from 1900 to 2024. They found that the temperature was relatively stable before 1900, but from 1960 to 2024, the average temperature from January to March increased by 0.12°C every 10 years.