Israel And Arab Neighbors Around The Red Sea Are Joining Forces To Save The World's Corals

• 01

  In 2017, it was announced that the coral in the northern Red Sea was very resistant to the bleaching effects that have overcome a majority of the world's corals

  
  via Maoz Fine

  "In the last 30 years we have lost 50% of the coral around the world," says Maoz Fine, Israeli researcher Professor, from the Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences at Bar-Ilan University.

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• 02

  The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, will act as a "neutral umbrella"

  
  via Maoz Fine

  The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, will act as a "neutral umbrella" as they oversee liaison between all the countries and research as to how the Red Sea has managed to resist the bleaching effects that have caused the collapse of so many other reefs around the world. 

• 03

  With the water temperatures rising due to global warming, the coral simply cannot survive, and with their deaths, a million fish who depend on those corals for food and protection perish as well.

  
  via Maoz Fine

  Fine continues to tell The Times of Israel, "Now in French Polynesia and Sri Lanka and other places there are huge bleaching events, it's really happening in a very small time frame that we're losing the corals." 

• 04

  But the Red Sea is unique.

  
  via Maoz Fine

  The sea has acted as a type of "thermal refuge," and the corals are able to withstand experiments of what future summer conditions would feel like, high temperatures and acidification. Fine and his Swiss teammates want to determine exactly which gene allows the coral to be able to survive in higher temperatures, in hopes to help save other reefs that are fading. Unfortunately, the data for other parts of the Red Sea was severely lacking in quantity and quality, due to the fact of the countries separation.  

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• 05

  With the Transnational Research Center, Swiss researchers will work individually with each country to place hundreds of monitors around the Red Sea, which will upload data in real time to a cloud-based database run by EPFL.

  
  via Maoz Fine

  Hopefully, the coming together of these countries can help save our oceans and lead to future unity in other major world-saving efforts. 

  You can read more about it at The Times of Israel

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