What is the Great Barrier Reef, and who looks after it?
It is thousands of reefs, not one: the biggest structure built by living things, and James Cook ran his ship aground on it in 1770.
โถ Start the storyThe Great Barrier Reef is the largest coral reef system on Earth: more than 2,900 separate reefs and about 900 islands, stretching over 2,300 kilometres off the coast of Queensland, Australia, across roughly 344,400 square kilometres. It is not one reef but a chain of thousands, and it is the world's biggest single structure made by living organisms, built by billions of coral polyps.
2,900
People have known it for a very long time. Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples have long used it, and it is an important part of local groups' cultures and spirituality. Europeans arrived much later. Louis de Bougainville encountered it in 1768 without exploring it, and James Cook met it in 1770 in the least pleasant way possible: on 11 June his ship, HMS Endeavour, ran aground on a south of today's Cooktown, and the crew needed seven weeks to repair her. Matthew Flinders, who mapped it in more detail in 1802, gave it the name we use. He called any reef that blocks a sailing ship, or the waves, from reaching the coast a barrier reef.
Today it is also a nature reserve and a crowded neighbourhood. More than 1,500 species of fish live there, along with 400 kinds of coral, and in 1981 it was listed as a . A large part of it lies in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, which limits the impact of fishing and tourism and has its own authority, created by law in 1975.
Its size does not make it safe. A study published in 2012 found that the reef had lost more than half of its since 1985, and a 2020 study found that over half had gone between 1995 and 2017. of pollutants, climate change with mass bleaching, sludge and outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish all add pressure.
Quiz me
0/3
Recap
The Great Barrier Reef is a chain of thousands of reefs, long known to Indigenous peoples, now partly protected but still losing coral.
๐ก A trick to remember it ยท Think of the reef as a long city of 2,900 neighbourhoods, every wall built by tiny animals.
Surprising fact ยท It is the world's biggest single structure made by living organisms.
Sources (2)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (18 claims) cites at least one of these.