The u. S. State of california thousands of firefighters are battling twenty two blazes in the northern part of the state those are the headlines on ours as their technology is coming up next. Witness documentaries that open your eyes at this time on aljazeera coral reefs of the rain forests of the sea prize for their beauty and resorts is the world over. They are also one of the earths most fundamental ecosystems a threat to Climate Change and no place better symbolizes their importance and 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 and were doing it to me way this is a show about science by signed. On to. Everything. Here. Ok so this commission they see behind me is a bunch of people already getting ready to dive in the grey area for the first time much like me. Techno is marie 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 pin you 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 two thousand and 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 the resources and we need to get everyone behind the solutions solutions. The problems that are becoming legion. There are multiple stresses that face color race like the Great Barrier reef is sediments a new transit flowing down rivers and smothering corals and other organisms that has been too much fishing in some cases where weve knocked out keith bases but the real showstoppers now the Global Changes that were inflicting 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 who 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 a micro algae called 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 but 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. If that quickly went viral it sent the g. R. S. 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 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 past if we were trying to do an experiment about Climate Change flea 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 brain 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 what whats going on this is our newest experiment which were calling evolution twenty one and its about trying to with this whats going to happen in terms of evolution in the twenty First Century but these very large tanks which enable us to establish these maize it dozens and one of these a cousin is is its not just one particular species of home weve got all of the things in the tank tenuously that weve bought corals weve got some giant plans in the tanks we thought see a chance for your sense of trying to recreate that you go system but under controlled conditions a bit better than the belly of 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 caught up behind local Climate Change the surface temperatures are rising the oceans are becoming more sedate so what this experiment is is were 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 kind of 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. Carbon dioxide so thats the right give me give me some of the stuff here ok city and be a tank is set at about one hundred ten watts but you know you have a dark side which is currently condition so to generate out endian values weve taken the last ten years temperature dot and weve averaged that and that for this day is about twenty 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 ambient conditions and then how are you manipulating the conditions off of your baseline here yeah your other dream so i did three. Happened outside conditions for ten six hundred id which is whats being projected at the earlier parts per million or around twenty eight and nine hundred twenty one hundred so thats what they rejected by the i. P. C. C. We put temperature we take the temperature values from now and be a tank 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 to. Much of a button keeping it all running twenty four seven is the job of Operations ManagerCraig Humphrey so just for example bring up an experiment that is looking at Climate Change and i just have a question ok so the example here is is that we have the temperature one each one of these rectangles represents i think tank with an ordinary car or a function of has a some of these are some of the tanks that weve already looked at exactly so temperature one is indicated by these color rectangles each color represents a different page ok there is no different concentration of c o two yes exactly so what we have in this room we have four different temperatures we have four 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 of trying to say this is representative not 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 the system evolution for a day is to develop whole still. Hasnt monsters to quantitate so its better to withstand five hundred from the city because. If we can perhaps mix from the strong the skeleton fossil grown process i did an ideal world for all of the about madeline van op and is a Principle Research scientist at a. Aims 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 crossing different species of course and the rationale is that the likely provide new characteristics to that that they can and if they do. What we were then the son of three grown these high risk pools on the predict the future ocean and this isnt base where you have nothing else left something those individuals that perform for they now im really curious about this how do you go about the crossfertilization what are the what are the mechanics involved in reading a form yes a person would need to send a team out to the region to to collect whole phone use that that have ritual x. So we need 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 package both sperm an 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 sprays like decorated Christmas Trees thats waiting with them applying for want of releases of those bomb no stay close to the surface of the bed and we kind of hope come up with very simple. Facts and remember to bring them into our rearing 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 berry looks after them while they are at their most vulnerable so point out to me what im looking at i mean you these look like little dust particles but theyre baby corn thats exactly right and each one of those can grow into food and oh caro youre. Lucky enough to find the right spot on me and that they have the right conditions so theyve theyre four years old thats whats going to happen im nuts so now were going to take these small larvae and were going to actually expose them to very hot temperatures to see whether we can identify winners under these conditions that the limits on and individuals from from this function all right and youre doing that 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 the nursery on one side and over here is the sauna say this is not this is essentially where we space the lab its a very warm water and we did that for about three days to see which ones survive not all coral spawn them. Lab are crossbred some are simply manipulated or evolved but the endgame 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 wire these guys so important this this Little Corner somebody you know and what it was initially its several dozen its a lot of those bratz here in the sea simulator and hopefully and then another this in this whole 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 that can be a very demoralizing thing to do but in this case here 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 that we could improve the success of. Restoration. But also we hope that we will be able to increase resilience of. How things are in systems vibrating maybe some of some of those snow and hans poles you know releasing them into the them finding the breeding with the natives or we would hope that that would increase resilience and loosen them up so negatively in fact that for over two goldberg the threat to coral reefs goes beyond simply the concerns of scientists when you take what coal race represents to paypal and this is the amazing numbers right so the business to might have five hundred Million People on the planet who come to call results on a daily basis to get food and income now thats about one in every twelve people that is dependent on coral reef worldwide four hours north of the. 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 wonder 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 with the Scientific Community look there is no doubt that tourism is the backbone