The scientist who was branded alarmist for exposing the fate of coral reefs

What he and his colleagues found was that corals had a temperature threshold. Once those temperatures are breached, the corals start to expel the tiny algae that live inside them and give corals their colour and much of their nutrients.

Rather than having a century or more, the models suggested as early as the 2020s some reefs could be bleaching six or more times a decade – a frequency far too high to give them time to recover.