From Peter Hartcher

It took 6000 years or more for nature to grow the world's biggest living structure, the Great Barrier Reef, one of the seven wonders of the natural world.  So big that it can be seen from the moon, so lovely up close that the poet Kenneth Slessor described it as "flowers turned to stone".And it's taken us a scant few decades to inflict major damage on this priceless asset. It's a dazzlingly beautiful ecosystem whose beauty we are bleaching out.The Australian Institute of Marine Science says there is no ecological signature of widespread coral bleaching in the reef's history.  Yet in the past two decades there have been three "mass bleaching events", the first in 1998. The current one is the worst so far. Rising ocean temperatures are the chief culprit.
With the fading of the reef's colours, we have to expect that the economic ecosystem that it supports will also fade.  And even though we all know that chance has gifted the reef uniquely to Australia to enjoy and to protect, the news of its most severe bleaching didn't even rate in the top five news topics.
In the first week of the news breaking, it ranked as the ninth most reported subject, according to the media monitoring specialists at iSentia. The most reported topics of that week in Australia were tax reform, the Twenty20 World Cup, the Socceroos, the Australian Building and Construction Commission and the Egyptian airline hijacking.
In the second week, as more evidence of yet more extensive mass bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef emerged, the topic dropped to number 10.Similarly, there was relatively little reporting of the record-breaking heatwaves of February, says iSentia's Patrick Baume.

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