Major Australian Coral Reef Shattered By Muscular Cyclone, Studies Show

"A major coral reef off Australia's northwest coast has been ripped apart by a powerful cyclone described by scientists as "mother nature at its wildest". Researchers from the Australian Institute of Marine Science said Scott Reef in the Indian Ocean suffered "spectacular damage" when tropical Cyclone Fay raged over it in late March.

"The degree of destruction observed at Scott Reef is extremely rare, at most a one-in-100-year event," said Luke Smith, the institute's top scientist in Western Australia. Fay, packing wind gusts of up to 300 kilometres per hour, "uprooted many large coral colonies and tore huge reef boulders up to five metres in diametre from the reef's edge," Smith said.

"Many of the corals that survived the cyclone were severely damaged, their branches removed leaving only their bases," he said. "Even colonies down to 20 metres were damaged and buried under rubble," he said. Marine scientists only discovered the devastation caused by Fay when they visited the reef this month to document how the coral was recovering from a mass bleaching event that struck tropical reefs worldwide in 1998.

Scott Reef, located about 300 kilometres off Australia's northwest tip, was one of the worst affected by the bleaching — a process associated with global warming in which the colourful tissue of the coral dies off, leaving the white skeleton behind. The reef lost 80 per cent of its coral at the time and Smith said scientists feared the cyclone damage "has shattered all recovery since the bleaching".

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