 It's absolutely shocking to dive on a reef that you know well and just see it turn white in the space of a week It's the scariest thing I've ever seen in my life Last year in 2016. We had an extreme coral bleaching event in the Great Barrier Reef What's really shocking is instead of the reef having a recovery time We're actually seeing the reef go straight back into another bleaching year in 2017 So our study compared what happened in 2016 to what happened in previous years when we had bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef And what we found was in previous years bleaching was more related to natural variability such as really strong flood events or El Nino Southern Oscillation episodes But what we found for 2016 was none of those factors could explain what happened And really what happened there was the reef bleaching last year was related to climate change Not these other factors Our research took a bit of a different approach to previous studies and we combined what was going on in terms of the biology of the reef And also what was going on in terms of climate change and those natural climate variations and that hadn't been done before There is hope for recovery and what we're seeing is in reefs that have clean water and where the temperature drops to normal levels again We're already seeing signs that the corals can continue to grow and be reproductive So we really need to be reducing how many greenhouse gases we're emitting into the atmosphere And that means that we need to be focusing on other sources of energy