Pixie Pinnacle on Ribbon Reef No. 10 is a coral tower so densely encrusted with soft corals and sea fans that it barely looks real. It's one of the most photographed dive sites on the Great Barrier Reef.
The Coral Sea Marine Park extends 1,100 kilometres east of the Great Barrier Reef, encompassing a series of remote atolls and submerged reefs that represent some of the most pristine coral ecosystems on Earth.
The first time I flew over the Great Barrier Reef — not to it, but over it, in a light plane out of Cairns — I understood why people struggle to describe it accurately. From two thousand metres, the reef…
I dived the same reef twice — once in 2014, once in 2018 — and the difference between those two dives is the clearest way I know to explain what coral bleaching actually means in practice. In 2014, the site…
Heron Island sits at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef, surrounded by one of the most studied coral reef ecosystems on Earth. The research station has been here since 1951. The reef has been here much longer.
Heron Island is not like other places I’ve stayed near a reef. At most dive destinations, the ocean is something you travel to — you board a boat, cross some water, arrive at the site. At Heron Island, the reef…
Anyone who spends enough time around coral reefs eventually begins noticing how strongly tides shape the entire environment. The reef may appear calm and unchanged from one hour to the next, but the water level is constantly moving. In many…
Most of what divers know about coral reefs is knowledge of the top thirty metres. That’s the zone accessible on standard recreational scuba, and it’s where the research, the photography, the tourism, and the public conversation about reef health has…
Osprey Reef is three hundred and fifty kilometres from the Queensland coast, and getting there requires a night crossing of open ocean on a liveaboard. I’ve done that crossing four times. Each time, I’ve woken to the same thing: blue…
Most visitors first see the Great Barrier Reef in the middle of the day. Tour boats arrive from the mainland, snorkelers gather along floating platforms, and the water surface is usually textured by wind. It can still be a remarkable…