Seven years ago, on a remote coral reef halfway between Indonesia and Australia, coral scientist Taryn Foster watched as record ocean temperatures decimated the pristine ecosystem that she’d been studying for years.
“The whole system just crashed,” she says. “It was a super disturbing thing to see. Over the space of a few months, or even weeks, we saw the corals bleach, and then we came back a few months later, and much of the system had died—everything that relies on the coral, like the fish, and even giant 100-year-old clams, had died.”