Coral reefs are the backbone for the entire ocean. They are the nursery for the ocean. About a quarter of all marine life in the ocean spends part of its lifecycle on a coral reef. And there are about a billion or so people that depend on coral reefs for fish for their food, for protein.
The question is not, "Is climate change happening?" Nor is the question, "Is climate change man-made?" Rather, we need to realize itʼs already here, and start asking, "What are we going to do about it?"
I feel a responsibility to get the truth out into the world.
I believe deeply that every one of us has an individual talent or trait that can be used to make a difference in some way.
Climate change isnʼt a distant threat. Itʼs already changing the way we live.
We can and must use our combined skills at every opportunity available to address climate change.
There's a huge challenge around coral bleaching specifically, because when most people think about coral, they think about the beautiful, white sculpture sitting on their mantle. And it looks so pristine and clean and beautiful. It's not supposed to look like that when it's in the ocean. It has color, it has animal flesh living on it, it has plants living inside of that. They look very, very different when they're healthy in the ocean than they do when they're sitting in somebody's home.
A child born today will experience an increase to sea level of about three to six feet. The rate of change is so remarkable and so dramatic. We are already seeing the consequences of man-made climate change.
The really valuable thing about documenting coral bleaching is that it is this straight, very direct visual indicator of how hot the oceans are getting. If the temperature of the water passes a certain threshold, the corals turn white. It's that simple. There's nothing natural about the cycle that's going on right now. In 2016, we lost 29 percent of the Great Barrier Reef. So 29 percent of the Great Barrier Reef died in a single year, because the water was hot.
The consequences of man-made climate change are real and very significant.
Working in the Arctic is definitely colder, but not necessarily harder. There were different challenges. And in many ways, Chasing Coral was even more of a struggle for me personally. And more of a struggle to capture. Glaciers right now are changing very consistently. The interesting thing that we realized with Chasing Coral was that the corals reefs. They can go from living to dead in two months. And if you're not there at the right time to capture that before and after, you just show up and it's a dead reef. So it was a challenge to be at the right place at the right time.
