Going, going, going .....................

Australia's Great Barrier Reef is a glittering gem — the world's largest coral reef ecosystem — chock-full of diverse marine life. But new research shows it is also in steep decline, with half of the reef vanishing in the past 27 years.

Katharina Fabricius, a coral reef ecologist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science and study co-author, told LiveScience that she has been diving and working on the reef since 1988 — and has watched the decline. "I hear of the changes anecdotally, but this is the first long-term look at the overall status of the reef.

There are still a lot of fish, and you can see giant clams, but not the same color and diversity as in the past."
To get their data, Fabricius and her colleagues surveyed 214 different reefs around the Great Barrier Reef, compiling information from 2,258 surveys to determine the rate of decline between 1985 and 2012. They estimated the coral cover, or the amount of the seafloor covered with living coral.

That overall 50-percent decline, they estimate, is a yearly loss of about 3.4 percent of the reef.

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Australia evacuates coastal cities as cyclone nears

By Rob Taylor Rob Taylor

TOWNSVILLE, Australia (Reuters) – Australia evacuated thousands of people from its northeast coast on Tuesday as a cyclone rivaling Hurricane Katrina bore down on tourism towns and rural communities, with officials saying it could even threaten areas deep inland that were ruined by floods last month.

Mines, rail lines and coal ports were closed in Queensland state as Cyclone Yasi headed toward the coast. Up to a third of Australia's sugar crop was also under threat, officials said.

"This storm is huge and life threatening," Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said, warning the system was intensifying and picking up speed on its path from the Coral Sea, with destructive winds expected from Wednesday morning.