How scientists wrestle with grief over climate change
Arriving at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in October 2016, Tim Gordon thought he was living a dream. As a boy growing up in the southeast African country of Malawi, he’d covered his bedroom walls with Technicolor reef posters and vowed one day to explore those underwater worlds. The marine biologist was unprepared for what he found: a silent and colorless field of submerged rubble. At Lizard Island, off the northeastern coast of Queensland, Gordon hoped to study the sounds of the reef’s creatures. “A reef should be noisy,” with crunching parrot fish, scraping sea urchins and myriad squeaks, rumbles and whoops of other marine animals, says Gordon, of the University of Exeter in England. But many of these creatures had vanished as climate change warmed the ocean, triggering widespread coral bleaching in 2016 and 2017. “Instead of documenting nature’s wonders,” he says, “I was documenting its degradation.” Scientists like Gordon are grieving...