A sixteen people are dead in the u. S. State of california as wildfires continue to spread for a third day the fires have scorched the states famous wine country and forced more than twenty thousand people from their homes. As always plenty more news on our web site aljazeera dot com and in the news well continue here after techno i. O. P. To say with a sense of watching. Aljazeera. Where ever you. Are the rain forests of the sea prize for their beauty and resorts is the wildlife. Also one of the most fun ecosystems a threat to Climate Change and no place better symbolizes their importance on their plight than australias Great Barrier reef. This is technically a show about innovation and change not were going to explore the intersection of hardware and humanity made during its unique way this is a show about science i signed. On. Every week oh yes. Ok so this commercial they see behind me is a bunch of people already getting ready to dive in the Great Barrier for the first time much like me. Techno is married to davis and travel to queensland to see firsthand one of the seven natural wonders of the wild. And to explore the scientific efforts to save it. Ask a thousand different people to describe what makes australias Great Barrier reef special and youll get a thousand different answers and sometimes none at all just to be new silence a nod to the fact that there exists things on this earth so beautiful he defied description and yet for all its capacity to inspire us on an intimate level its when we step back that we are even more amazed the Great Barrier reef covers three hundred forty five thousand square kilometers roughly the size of germany it stretches twenty three hundred kilometers in length nearly equal to the entire coastline of chile and its the only living structure on earth that can be seen from space and therein lies its vulnerability because it lives it can also die. Although coral reefs cover less than two percent of the ocean floor twenty five percent of all marine life depend on them for their survival and yet according to the World Resources institute by the year twenty fifty nearly all coral reefs worldwide including the Great Barrier reef will be threatened with death a scientific prediction that if correct will mean the disappearance of one of the earths most vital and enduring ecosystems within most of our lifetimes. Off the coast of northeastern australia where the Great Barrier reef meets the shallows i meet with over two goldberg director of the Global Change institute at the university of queensland for him a hope for the best approach is no longer on the table i mean world wars were quite willing to spend half of the supposedly come solving the problem this is as big or even bigger than a world war and we need to get both a result of and we need to get everyone behind the solutions solutions. Problems that are becoming legion. There are multiple stresses that face color race like the Great Barrier reef is sediments a new transfer slowing down rivers and smothering corals and other organisms that has been too much fishing in some cases where weve knocked out teeth bases but the real showstoppers now the Global Changes that we are like being on on coral reefs and its the showstoppers that could be potentially catastrophic according to the World Resources institute the absorption of an increased level of atmosphere Carbon Dioxide into the oceans has caused them to become more acidic this change in water chemistry inhibits the ability of corals to skeletons are composed of Calcium Carbonate to grow and increase in Carbon Dioxide emissions has also led to trapped atmospheric heat which in turn has led to higher water temperatures warmer water disrupts the symbiotic relationship that a coral has with the micro algae called zose and belly the belly is responsible for the corals food supply and when it leaves the coral begins to starve the effect turns the coral white and is known as coral bleaching the heart of the problem is this scientific models show both Ocean Acidification and Ocean Temperatures spiking to unprecedented levels over the next one hundred years levels that without intervention would spell the end of coral reefs. It was against this backdrop that in two thousand and sixteen the Great Barrier reef experienced one of the most severe bleaching episodes ever recorded initial surveys by researchers at the a. R. C center of excellence for coral reef studies put the areas affected by bleaching at ninety three percent and estimates about the resulting mortality figures ran the gamut few climate related events in history have captured the media and the publics attention more it included an obituary for the Great Barrier. That quickly went viral it sent the Tourism Industry into an uproar and even gave the Scientific Community pause and actual Mortality Survey conducted in late two thousand and sixteen also by the air sea center of excellence for coral reef studies proved a mixed bag the northern third of the reef was devastated losing an estimated sixty five percent of live coral coverage but the lower two thirds of the reef the area where the vast majority of reef tourism occurs escaped relatively unharmed spared by cooler waters from the coral sea just outside the city of townsville which sits at the southern tip of the Great Barrier reef a group of scientists are fighting to save coral reefs not just from bleaching events now but from the effects of Climate Change yet to come one of the goals of Marine Research in a time of Global Change is to gain insight into how Marine Systems like the Great Barrier reef may look into the future to achieve this researchers need to replicate and manipulate ocean conditions in controlled environments in other words literally bringing the ocean into the lab and that is exactly what is being done at the most advanced Research Aquarium in the world australias national sea simulator. A thirty five Million Dollars facility completely dedicated to tropical Marine Research for a scientific discipline whose researchers are used to working with simple tubs of water system is nothing short of revolutionary thats giving us the opportunity to do research that weve not been able to do before dr Nicole Webster is one of the lead coral scientists working at c so sorry you know in the process if we were trying to do an experiment about Climate Change free markets and corals and stick them in they sort of small nalley been sized tanks and hate them up a little bit but it doesnt really very closely reflect whats actually happening out on the range and the driving idea behind system is that if you have the tools and technology to accurately reflect conditions on the reef today then you can accurately replicate what conditions on the reef will look like tomorrow yeah so weve got a number of tanks here whats whats going on this is our newest experiment which withholding evolution twenty one and its about trying to assess whats going to happen in terms of evolution in the twenty First Century but these really large tanks which enable us to establish these maize it dozens and one of these a cousin is that is its not just one particular species of home weve got all of these things in the tank tenuously that weve bought orals weve got some giant plans in the tanks with but the chickens for your sense like trying to recreate the ecosystem but under controlled conditions about that manipulate the things youre interested in thats right and what were interested in many colliding with this experiment if the temperature and the c o two is that was part of the local Climate Change the surface temperatures are rising the oceans are becoming more sedate so what this experiment is is we looking at current day conditions and then were looking at conditions which are projected by the i. P. C. C. We choose the top and mental panel Climate Change on conditions which predicted for the year twenty fifty and in conditions which are projected to be twenty one hundred three so. Of tanks one an ambient tank that reflects temperature and ph conditions as they exist on the reef today a second that reflects those conditions for the year twenty fifty and a third that reflects the predicted conditions in twenty one hundred. But the level of control and detail in the system goes beyond even the. Tell me a little bit about the tanks that were looking at here i know this is our ambient yes and then youre manipulating temperature and Carbon Dioxide so that right give me give me some of the stuff here like a city and be a tank is set at about one hundred ten hot and you know you have a dark side which is currently condition so to generate out andy and values weve taken the last ten years temperature dot com weve averaged that and that for this day is about ninety nine point four degrees or Something Like that so that would that would be the temperature at this particular time on this particular day in the air being conditions and then how are you manipulating the conditions off of your baseline here yeah your other train moves so its a three. Happened outside conditions for ten six hundred i t. Which is whats being projected at the early parts per million or on twenty feet deep and then you are in hundred but twenty one hundred so thats what they rejected by the i. P. C. C. With the temperature we take the temperature values from the ambient thanks and then we apply plus one degree offset perhaps twenty fifty set of conditions and a plus two degree offset for at twenty one hundred which is that level of control and manipulation is available to every experimental room at the sea some facility and all of their tanks its a system that requires nearly one hundred kilometers of piping seven hundred to eight hundred thousand liters of new seawater daily and a Computer System that not only must keep water temperatures and ph levels accurate to within one hundredth of one percent but also controls it all through the touch of a button keeping it all running twenty four seven is the job of Operations ManagerCraig Humphrey they just for example bring up an experiment that is when youre on the train generations to the notion ok so the example here is is that we have the. Temperature one each one of these rectangles represents i think tank with an organism in a car or a front of his assumptions or some of the text that weve already looked at exactly so temperature one is indicated by these color rectangles each color represents a different page ok there is a different concentration of c o two yes exactly so what we have in this are we have four different temperatures here for different pages and every combination of these sixteen different water is running into this room so ill just let temperature three for example i can see the red thanks for trying to and thats a perfect enough time but all of the Cutting Edge Research that Systems Technology and engineering now allows ultimately one thing stands out weve never been able to run such a long time experiments because the quality of the water and the good quality of the controls put sophisticated enough that we could actually produce offspring after all its not whether the corals on the reef today will be able to adapt and exist on the reefs of two thousand and fifty and twenty one hundred its whether their descendants will researchers are seeking to determine not just whether corals can be conditioned to withstand future ocean conditions but whether those manipulated corals can pass those survival traits on to future generations the process is known as assisted evolution so the main goal of this is the evolution point today is to develop the skill. And present monsters in the climate so its better to withstand hide Something Else in the city because. If we can perhaps mix from the strong the skeletons hasa grown closer i did an audio all of the about madeline van op and is a Principal Research scientist at ames and leads its assisted Evolution Program and how are you going about this to walk me through some of the nuts and bolts of how this Research Goes about we are and crossing different species a and the rationale was that the mark may. I provide new characteristics to that but they commanded me to. Let me go down the center of the growing this high risk pools on the public the future ocean conditions and basically have Natural Selection make those individuals that perform for they go out im really curious about this how do you go about the crossfertilization what are the what are the mechanics involved in reading a coral its a person or we need to send a team out to the river to to collect home use that and have ritual x. So many to go around and pick those companies that are ready to go. As seen in this video shot at regular speed the collected coral colonies are brought back to the sea simulator to spawn the corals packaged both sperm and egg into what are called bundles when they are ready to release the coral pushes the bundles through the mouth openings of their polyps creating a distinct visual image. Like Christmas Space like decorated christmas brings us right in with them applying for once again this is those bomb no stay close to the surface of the mic and us to come up with various and. Back and then we bring them into our law raring area the bundles are than separated into sperm and egg and crossbred according to the breeding match scientists wish to attain selected sperm and egg are reintroduced to each other through and in vitro process two hours later fertilization is complete and what are now coral larvae are moved into rearing tanks were dr lena bay looks after them while they are at their most vulnerable so point out what im looking at i mean you know these look like little dust particles but their baby clothes thats exactly right and each one of those can grow into. An old car oh if that lucky enough to find the right spot on me and have the right conditions so therefore it is old thats whats going to happen im not. So now were going to take these small larvae and were going to actually expose them to a very hot temperatures to see whether we can identify and winners under these conditions that the limits on them and individuals from from this bunch in here all right and youre doing not just next door just over here all right so baby coral go from those tanks over there and they wind up here yeah thats right so we have a nursery on one side and. This is on this is essentially where we. Need to very warm. And we do that for about three days. See which one survives not all coral spawned in the lab are crossbred some are simply manipulated or evolved but the end game is the same all right so this is one of the rooms where youre you have an experiment running and i see these little plugs with teeny tiny little world where these guys are so important this this Little Corner somebodys hero and but it was initially its. A lot of articles brets here in the sea simulator and hopefully. This in this election be able to reproduce itself with the project that you have going on i mean it seems to me like its its very Solutions Oriented right i mean a lot of the time you know scientists are are documenting the decline of a system and it can be a very demoralizing thing to do but in this case youre youre trying to come up with a solution here what is in your opinion what is the end game of of your research what is the final result here are we are you driven to action i think is first if we could improve the success of. Us why shouldnt. We hope that we will be able to increase resilience of. How things are in systems form grading maybe someone from. No snow and hans falls you know releasing them into the barn the breeding with the nato forces we would hope that that would increase the salience down and loosen them up so negatively impact the poor for over two goldberg the threat to coral reefs goes beyond simply the concerns of scientists when you take what coral reefs represent to paypal and this is the amazing numbers right so theres an estimated five hundred Million People on the planet who come to chorizo most on a daily basis to get food and income now thats about one in every twelve people that is dependent on coral reefs worldwide four hours north of the ames facility is the port city of cannes the primary maritime gateway to the Great Barrier reef more than two Million People visit the Great Barrier reef every year many of them beginning their tour right here and thats what were here to do to see the reef through the eyes of those who make it an economic engine as well as an ecological one. Call mackenzie is the executive director of the association of marine park tourism operators his job is to represent the interests of the g. B. R. S. Tourism industry both with the government and wit