Glaciers & Ice Caps

Everyone has heard the news, and I'm sure you've heard this line repeated several times: "The Polar Ice Caps are Melting".
Each year, the sea level rises an inch. The ocean gets warmer every year, too, resulting in more severe hurricanes like what we saw with hurricane Katrina in 2006 in Louisiana. But of course, I'm sure you knew that too. But part of the reason it rises is because the warmer climate is causing the ice to weaken, and therefore chunks of the ice caps break off, and those chunks become icebergs. you drop a rock into a glass of water, the water rises. This is what is happening to the earth. 70% of the earth's water and 90% of its ice comes from Antarctica. If the ice on that land mass were to melt, the sea level would rise 200 ft. But, that is completely unlikely, because parts of that continent has a temperature that never gets above freezing.
Greenland, on the other hand, is experiencing 3 times the melting speed it was 5 years ago. Researchers say that between April 2002 and November 2005 the melting of the surface of Greenland reached 57 cubic miles.

The Coral Reefs

So what's wrong with the Coral Reefs? Every year, hundreds of people go to see them. Why not take a little piece of the reef with you? If every one of those people took one inch of the reef...after a few years...what would the ocean life have? That's what is wrong with the reefs today. Although I know I'm not an expert, I do know that this isn't good for our coral reefs' ecosystems. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has tried to extend the prohibitions of the ESA (Endangered Species Act) to both the staghorn and elkhorn corals. The NOAA has also made an effort to stop the taking and trading of elkhorn and staghorn corals, so that the species will have a chance to grow back. The staghorn coral (shown to the upper left) is accurately named, because it looks like the rack of antlers on a stag. The elkhorn coral (top left) looks similar to the staghorn, however, unlike the staghorn, it looks flatter and broader in dimension.

The Australian Barrier Reefs

Animals smaller than ants have built the great Barrier Reefs off the coast of Australia. Larger than anything ever built, the reef covers 92,000 square miles. Each year, new coral grows over the old coral, and the skeletons of old coral (Pacific atolls) are layered for nearly a mile under the surface of the living reef. You might think that these coral grow quickly and can undergo human strain, but the truth is, already one quarter of the earth's natural reefs have been destroyed. The big killer is pollution. An unbelievable amount of human waste (garbage and secretion) have been dumped into our oceans, wiping out some ecosystems. But Global Climate Change, Sedimentation, and Destructive Fishery Conducts have also made an unfriendly footprint on the reefs. Every year scientists are linking new coral diseases to unsanitary human activities. Wastewater from hotels, resorts, golf clubs, agriculture, and sewage treatment plants leak into the ocean and raises the ability to sustain algae life. Algae lives off the coral and suffocates it, blocking light from the sun and limiting new coral growth. Reefs need the right balance of light, temperature, and salinity to survive. Even if the temperature raises itself 3 degrees more, the reefs could be devastated. Scientists believe that over the next few years, the reefs will die. Who cares? Well, everyone should care, because reefs are the home of 1/4 of the earths marine life.
How do we stop it? The best thing for us to do is to help prevent global climate change. The Bush Administration has clearly turned away from this matter, but as the #1 polluter of the world, we need to TAKE ACTION...lets preserve the reefs for our great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren. I don't know about you, but 100 years from now, I want my descendants to know I did something to stop it. Let's be leaders. Show the world that the U.S knows what we have to do. Let's lead the world one person at a time into a better state of life...I want to know that we did something...together.