Forty percent of these newest challenger Vice President joseph bach a is on thirty one its likely theyll be a runoff next month as fifty percent of the vote is needed to victory well those are the headlines the news continues here on aljazeera the techno station thats watching. News has never been more available but the message is a simplistic and misinformation is rife the listening post provides a critical counterpoint challenging Mainstream Media narrative at this time on aljazeera coral reefs of the rain forest of the sea cries for their beauty and resorts is the well they. Say one of the most fun of all 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 make doing it the way. This is a show about science i find. Everything. Here. Ok so this conversion 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 davison 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 exist 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 china 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 who 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 a problem this is as big or even bigger than a world war and we need to get those sort of resources and we need to get everyone behind the Solutions Solutions to problems that are becoming legion. There are multiple stresses that face colorists like the Great Barrier reef is sediments a new transit flying down rivers and smothering corals and other organisms that has been too much fishing in some cases where weve knocked out case bases but the real showstoppers now are 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 Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide into the oceans has caused them to. Become more acidic this change in water chemistry inhibits the ability of corals whose skeletons are composed of Calcium Carbonate to grow and increase in Carbon Dioxide emissions has also led to a trapped atmosphere of 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. 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 reef 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 a. R. C 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 the 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 free markets and corals and stick them in a sort of small nalley bin size tank then 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 yes 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 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 maze of pauses and one of these a cousin is that is its not just one particular species of whole weve got all of these things in the tank tenuously that weve got corals weve got some giant plans in the tanks with but youre essentially trying to recreate the ecosystem but under controlled conditions about them and i believe the things youre interested in thats right and what were interested in many colliding with this experiment is the temperature and the c o two so its caught up on 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 condition 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 know you have a dark side which is currently condition so to generate out endian values weve taken the last ten years of temperature data and 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 ambient conditions and then how are you manipulating the conditions off of your baseline here yeah your other train so its a three on top of the outside conditions or ten six hundred i t. Which is whats being projected particularly in hot million or im twenty feet deep and nine hundred twenty one hundred so thats what they rejected by the i. P. C. C. With the temperature how 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 or bring up an experiment that is within your climate train generation divination 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 front ok so some of these are some of the tanks that weve already looked out exactly thirty 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 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 for trying to say this is there any good 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 for a day is to develop still. Hasnt monsters in the climate so its better to withstand high power from the city because. If we can perhaps mix from the strong the skeletons hasa grown closer i get an ideal world all of the about Madeline Van Oppen 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 rational basis at home like meat. And 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 public the future ocean and this isnt place where you have nothing else left and think those individuals that perform to take you out im really curious about this how do you go about the crossfertilization what are the what are the mechanics involved in creating a coral yes a person would need to send a team out to the rig so to collect whole phone use that have ritual acts so we need to go around and pick those ponies 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 i miss some of my Christmas Space like decorated christmas presents waiting with them look like for once again this is a those bomb no stay close to the surface of the bed and we kind of scoop them up with various and hard 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 can look like little dust particles but there are baby corals thats exactly right and each one of those can grow into food and karo youre. Lucky enough to find the right spot on the me and that they have the right conditions so therefore it is old thats whats going to happen come next 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 when it is under these conditions well that the limits on them 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 tough 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 little plugs with teeny tiny little girl wire these guys so important this this Little Corner somebodys euro and but it was initially its several dozen a lot of those brats here in the sea simulator and hopefully and then brought another to you this and this whole actually 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 requests and i certainly am but also we hope that we will be able to increase resilience around the family how things are in systems vibrating maybe someone some of those snow and hans poles you know releasing them into the environment and bringing with the native force 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 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 call results 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. The syllabi 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