Photos Document Coral Forest Annihilation

Photos Document Coral Forest Annihilation

Excerpt:
"By the late 1990s, it was clear that the reefs had been badly damaged by the trawlers. But nobody knew what the damage looked like or what exactly had been lost. Then, in 2001, Reed climbed into a tiny submarine, went back to the spots where he had helped take all those pictures in the '70s and took a second set of photos. Then he hauled the "before" and "after" pictures into his lab.

Reed spent a good part of the next several years putting before and after photos under a microscope, trying to figure out exactly how many corals had been lost since the 1970s.

"And what I saw devastated me," he says. "Instead of 60-foot reefs, I saw 60-foot mounds of rubble. Nearly every coral reef had been crushed to little pieces the size of his finger."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17102434&ft=1&f=1025