Rowley Shoals, a series of atolls off northwestern Australia, are popular with divers and fisherman interested in the hundreds of marine species.
Published Nov 7, 2011
An unusually cloud-free day provided this spectacular view of Cakaulevu Reef, Fiji, the world’s third largest reef system.
Published Aug 13, 2011
The Great Barrier Reef is the largest reef system on Earth, with more than 3,000 separate reefs and coral cays. It is also one of the most complex natural ecosystems.
Published May 31, 2016
In February 2017, the Great Barrier Reef continued to be exposed to warm ocean water—the main stressor on this coral system and the reason for its bleaching.
Published Mar 16, 2017
This French-governed archipelago contains the world’s third-largest coral reef structure.
Published Jul 27, 2008
Arrecife Alacranes, Spanish for "Scorpion Reef," is the largest reef in the southern Gulf of Mexico.
Published Jan 31, 2015
This marine wonder off of Belize is rich with mystery and biodiversity.
Published Aug 23, 2020
Sixty million years of erosion have exposed folded layers of rock.
Published Oct 3, 2007
The Sudanese coast of the Red Sea is a well-known destination for diving due to clear water and abundance of coral reefs (or shia’ab in Arabic). Reefs are formed primarily from precipitation of calcium carbonate by corals. (In addition to its commonly used meaning, precipitation can also describe how something dissolved in a solution becomes “undissolved” through chemical or biological processes.) Massive reef structures are built over thousands of years of succeeding generations of coral. In the Red Sea, fringing reefs form on shallow shelves of less than 50 meters depth along the coastline. This astronaut photograph illustrates the intricate morphology of the reef system located along the coast between Port Sudan to the northwest and the Tokar River delta to the southeast.
Published Mar 14, 2005
In late February 2007, NASA satellite images revealed that even the outer portions of the Australia’s Great Barrier Reef can be bathed in land-based pollution carried far offshore by plumes of river water. Conventional thinking was that river plumes affected only the lagoon and the inner portions of the reef. But images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite verify a new theory that not even the outer reefs are spared the impact of land-based pollution, which includes excess sediment, fertilizers, and pesticides.
Published Mar 29, 2007
