No. 55 of 108
August 7, 2025
Occupying only 0.01 percent of the ocean floor, coral reefs support nearly a quarter of all marine life. Warmer waters – particularly in areas where warming has occurred precipitously – have led to mass bleaching events, killing and stressing coral ecosystems. Among efforts to strengthen coral resiliency in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the largest living structure in the world, and Hawai‘i, home to 85 percent of all U.S. coral reefs: seeding reefs with corals that have built up resistance to heat. The challenge? Can coral reefs be restored fast enough to make up for the rate of destruction? Probably not. In the Arctic, researchers are running field experiments to thicken seasonal ice so it lasts longer in the warm months, reflecting more of the sun’s radiation back into space. Sea ice freezes from below. The thicker the ice, the slower it grows. To accelerate the process, researchers are drilling through the ice and pumping sprays of water on the surface, where the ice forms almost instantly. The challenge? Can enough polar geoengineering occur to keep up with the rate of polar melting? Probably not.
While resources are finite, cultivating resilience isn’t a zero-sum game. To be clear, saving all the corals and saving polar ice isn’t possible. So why try? Cultivating resilience is about giving beings a fighting chance to find and evolve ways to be in more harmoniously thriving relationship, rather than the rapid decline of destructive relationship. If harmoniously thriving relationship is the purpose, then resilience can’t be just about survival. No zombie reefs (or humans). No super-brined pockets (or super cranky humans) that end up accelerating the disappearance of ice (or civilization).