The pace of coral reef destruction is even faster than current trajectories by at least a decade. Future reefs will be remarkably different in structure and composition than reefs today.
While the world was successful at restoring some coral reefs, it is impossible to save all the reefs from dying only by humans. Coral reef restoration program manager for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Tom Moore accepts that even in the best of conditions, human divers can spend only three to four hours a day underwater, and those conditions are too rare.
That’s not enough to stabilize the collapse of coral reefs. It is explained that half the world’s coral reefs have died and the rest are expected to perish within this century. The vanishing coral reefs host 25 per cent of the ocean’s biodiversity and support fisheries that contribute billions of dollars to the global economy.
For a long time, we have been doing this using PVC pipes and zip ties by snorkelers and scuba divers, but it is the time to think of an effective alternative. We wouldn’t be able to resist the collapse of the reef ecosystem if don’t advent any technological means.
So we need to harness the power of automation technology, robotics and artificial intelligence that will sustain the coral reefs. It should be able to allow us to work at the scales that will be essential to wholly address this global challenge. Yet the solutions will not be available overnight, we need to start working on inventing them now so that they’re powerful and efficient when we need them. At the same time, we should continue working hard with the existing methods to make the change and begin to stabilize the system.
One of the main objectives will be the underwater robotics technology used by the offshore oil and gas industry to work closer to the surface with delicate corals. Artificial intelligence has already established with sensing of species from the undersea imagery.
Moore believes that all the tech exists to solve this problem, it’s only a matter of getting the right people in the right place at the right time. But it seems to be a complicated task. An underwater robot is to be designed that is capable of navigating around corals, making predictions and decisions using AI, etc. Beyond all the challenges, saving coral reefs might just help to save the world. So we should innovate technologies, that too having a long-term sustainability
