Doctor Gregory Stone was on a diving expedition off Fiji on December 26, 2004, when the first sketchy reports reached his ship about the undersea earthquake that had spawned a catastrophic &to=http://english.pravda.ru/mailbox/22/101/399/15927_tsunami.html' target=_blank>tsunami in South Asia. Amid his horror over the human toll, another thought quickly formed in the scientist's mind: What would be the impact of this natural disaster on the region's stunningly beautiful and ecologically critical coral reefs?
Several months later Stone, vice president of global marine programs for the New England Aquarium, traveled with a team to the Thai resort island of Phuket. Over the next two weeks, the team made approximately 500 dives at 56 sites, surveying the reefs to determine how badly they had been damaged and how long they might take to recover.
They found destruction, but also hope.
"In the fullness of time, the tsunami was just another bad day in the life of the coral reef. It will recover," said Stone, who spoke to The Associated Press from New Zealand, site of his latest expedition.
Stone concluded that it was the long-term intervention of humans, and not the momentary havoc wreaked by the tsunami, that posed the greatest threat to the &to=http://english.pravda.ru/society/2001/02/20/2608.html' target=_blank>reefs.
"What we found was that the effects of human activity _ overfishing, global warming _ actually had a stronger impact than the tsunami," he said. "It really woke us up to what is happening to the coral reefs of the world and what people are doing to them."
Wanting a palpable connection to the event, Stone's team chartered the Philkade, a 100-foot (30-meter) vessel that had been ferrying tourists to a popular dive site when the giant wave struck. Though pushed and spun around wildly, the Philkade, its crew and passengers came away remarkably unscathed.
The report, published by the aquarium and in the December issue of National Geographic, found that about 14 percent of the coral reefs in the tsunami zone surveyed by the team were severely damaged or destroyed. Roughly 50 percent sustained moderate damage and 36 percent survived with little or no damage, reports AP.
O.Ch.
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