Word: coralled
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...plane to the Maldives, tourists sigh about the luxury resorts and sun-dappled beaches to which they are bound. From above, the country's coral-fringed lagoons in the Indian Ocean look computer-generated: arrayed in turquoise pods, they stretch over an azure expanse that would span from Rome to Budapest. Ibn Battuta, the 14th century Arab explorer, hailed the archipelago as "one of the wonders of the world." Ever since, the Maldives has enchanted shipwrecked sailors, Hollywood celebrities and Russian oligarchs fortunate enough to wash up by its shores. Yet beneath this outsiders' vision of paradise lurks a more...
...Swelling Sea As if all that was not enough, the archipelago nation faces a more elemental challenge. It could find itself submerged, its fragile coastline and coral reefs facing extinction as sea levels swell. "We are sitting on a time bomb," says Abdul Azeez, a leading Maldivian environmentalist. For a nation of so small a size (the Maldives' population is less than 400,000), the new government's task is monumental. "It is as if, in the same country, both Saddam Hussein was toppled and the Berlin Wall fell," says Ahmed Naseer, a painter and dissident who lived in exile...
...routes - want to leave, and Nasheed knows the sovereign fund is a last resort. Efforts now aim at shaping the country into a climate-change laboratory. In mid-March, the government announced its intention to be the world's first carbon-neutral nation within 10 years. The archipelago's coral reefs can also provide an invaluable testing ground for scientists. "Coral is the bedrock of our nation," says Azeez, who works at a coral-research and -regeneration facility at the Banyan Tree resort. With enough investment, he reckons the country can not only pioneer methods to mitigate rising waters...
...half his time trying to understand processes deep in the Earth’s interior and the other half understanding surface processes. The two, he says, are intimately connected, although perhaps not on a human time scale. In one recent research project, Mukhopadhyay used noble gas concentrations in ocean coral off the coast of Africa as a way of tracking how dust emission rates have changed in response to climate variation. Because the drying of the Northern African Sahel region has caused widespread famine in recent decades, Mukhopadhyay says his research may be useful in understanding how further climate change...
...springtime events like the flowering of plants as much as six weeks earlier than normal, and pushing the arrival of fall ever further back in the calendar. Lengthening summers have translated not just to more days of warm temperatures but more drought and wildfires as well. (See pictures of coral reefs in peril...