his withdrawal would give the electoral commission enough time to introduce reforms to help deliver a more credible election present a hurricane yet was declared the winner of the aug eighth vote marking protests. wildfires in the u.s. state of california have left at least thirteen people dead and more than one hundred injured or than two thousand homes and businesses have been destroyed in the northern wind producing region meanwhile in southern parts five thousand homes have been evacuated as fire crews struggled to control the blaze moshing is wrapped up in liberia's presidential election the first democratic transfer of power in seventy three years ellen johnson sirleaf is stepping down after two terms in office the nobel peace prize winner was africa's first female elected head of state twenty candidates are taking part in the poll including former football star george weah. and the u.s. state department is offering a seven million dollar award for the capture of to hezbollah officials lebanese

group has been designated a terrorist organization by the us or award is being offered for the head of hezbollah as external security organization and top military operative. you're up to date with all of our top stories that's it for myself and the team here in london but there is much more news coming up from doha in twenty five minutes time after techno which is next. we understand the differences and the similarities of cultures across the world. so no matter where you call home al-jazeera will bring you the news and current affairs that matter to. al-jazeera. coral reefs of the rain forests of the sea prize for their beauty and resources the world over. they are also one of the earth's most fundamental ecosystems a threat to climate change and no place better symbolizes their importance and

their plight than australia's great barrier reef. this is techno a show about innovation and change not we're going to explore the intersection of hardware and humanity and we're doing it any way this is a show about science by signed. on. to everything. here. ok so this commercial they see behind me is a bunch of people already getting ready to dive in the great barrier for the first time much like me. techno is married to davis and travel to queensland to see firsthand one of the seven natural wonders of the world. and to explore the scientific efforts to save it.

ask a thousand different people to describe what makes australia's great barrier reef special and you'll get a thousand different answers and sometimes none at all just to be new silence a nod to the fact that there exists things on this earth so beautiful he defied description and yet for all its capacity to inspire us on an intimate level it's when we step back that we are even more amazed the great barrier reef covers three hundred forty five thousand square kilometers roughly the size of germany it stretches twenty three hundred kilometers in length nearly equal to the entire coastline of chile and it's the only living structure on earth that can be seen from space and therein lies its vulnerability because it lives it can also die. although coral reefs cover less than two percent of the ocean floor twenty five percent of all marine life depend on them for their survival and yet according to

the world resources institute by the year two thousand and fifty nearly all coral reefs worldwide including the great barrier reef will be threatened with death a scientific prediction that if correct will mean the disappearance of one of the earth's most vital and enduring ecosystems within most of our lifetimes. off the coast of northeastern australia where the great barrier reef meets the shallows i meet with over two goldberg director of the global change institute at the university of queensland for him a hope for the best approach is no longer on the table i mean world wars we're quite willing to spend half of the supposedly come solving a problem this is as big or even bigger than a world war and we need to get those sort of resources and we need to get everyone behind the solutions solutions. the problems that are becoming legion. there are multiple stresses that face color race like the great barrier reef is sediments

a new transfer slowing down rivers and smothering corals and other organisms that has been too much fishing in some cases where we've knocked out keith bases but the real showstoppers now the global changes that we're inflicting on on coral reefs and it's the showstoppers that could be potentially catastrophic according to the world resources institute the absorption of an increased level of atmosphere carbon dioxide into the oceans has caused them to become more acidic this change in water chemistry inhibits the ability of corals who skeletons are composed of calcium carbonate to grow and increase in carbon dioxide emissions has also led to trapped atmospheric heat which in turn has led to higher water temperatures warmer water disrupts the symbiotic relationship that a coral has with a micro algae called belly the belly is responsible for the corals food supply and when it leaves the coral begins to starve the effect turns the coral white and is

known as coral bleaching the heart of the problem is this scientific models show both ocean acidification and ocean temperatures spiking to unprecedented levels over the next one hundred years levels that without intervention would spell the end of coral reefs. it was against this backdrop that in two thousand and sixteen the great barrier reef experienced one of the most severe bleaching episodes ever recorded initial surveys by researchers at the a r c center of excellence for coral reef studies but the areas affected by bleaching at ninety three percent and estimates about the resulting mortality figures ran the gamut few climate related events in history have captured the media and the public's attention more it included an obituary for the great barrier. that quickly went viral it sent the g.r.s. tourism industry into an uproar and even gave the scientific community pause and

actual mortality survey conducted in late two thousand and sixteen also by the a.r.c center of excellence for coral reef studies proved a mixed bag the northern third of the reef was devastated losing an estimated sixty five percent of live coral coverage but the lower two thirds of the reef the area where the vast majority of reef tourism occurs escaped relatively unharmed spared by cooler waters from the coral sea just outside the city of townsville which sits at the southern tip of the great barrier reef a group of scientists are fighting to save coral reefs not just from bleaching events now but from the effects of climate change yet to come one of the goals of marine research in a time of global change is to gain insight into how marine systems like the great barrier reef may look into the future to achieve this researchers need to replicate and manipulate ocean conditions in controlled environments in other words literally

bringing the ocean into the lab and that is exactly what is being done at the most advanced research aquarium in the world australia's national sea simulator. a thirty five million dollars facility completely dedicated to tropical marine research for a scientific discipline whose researchers are used to working with simple tubs of water system is nothing short of revolutionary that's giving us the opportunity to do the research that we've not been able to do before dr nicole webster is one of the lead coral scientists working at c so sorry you're in the process if we would try and do an experiment about climate change free markets and corals and stick them in they sort of small nalley been sized tanks and hate them up a little bit but it doesn't really very closely reflect what's actually happening out on the range and the driving idea behind cease is that if you have the tools and technology to accurately reflect conditions on the reef today then you can

accurately replicate what conditions on the reef will look like tomorrow yeah so we've got a number of tanks here what what's going on this is our newest experiment which we're calling evolution twenty one and it's about trying to assess what's going to happen in terms of evolution in the twenty first century but these really large tanks which enable us to establish these maize appalls them and one of these a cousin is that is it's not just one particular species of home we've got all of the things in the tank female tennis needs that we've bought corals with but from giant plans in the tanks we thought see it and your sense of trying to recreate that you go system but under controlled conditions about that manipulate the things you're interested in that's right and what we're interested in many colliding with this experiment it's the temperature and the b c o two so it's caught up on local climate change the surface temperatures are rising the oceans are becoming more sedate so what this experiment is is we're looking at current day conditions and

then we're looking at conditions which are projected by the i.p.c.c. we choose the top and mental panel climate change conditions which is predicted to be twenty fifty and in conditions which are projected to be twenty one hundred three so. of tanks one an ambient tank that reflects temperature and ph conditions as they exist on the reef today a second that reflects those conditions for the year twenty fifty and a third that reflects the predicted conditions in twenty one hundred. but the level of control and detail in the system goes beyond even the. tell me a little bit about the tanks that we're looking at here i know this is our ambient yes and then you're manipulating temperature and carbon dioxide so that's right give me give me some of the stuff here like i said the n.d. a tank is set at about one hundred ten watts but you know you have a dark side which is currently condition so to generate out endian values we've taken the last ten years temperature dot and we've averaged that and that for this

day is about ninety nine point four degrees or something like that so that would that would be the temperature at this particular time on this particular day in the ambient conditions and then how are you manipulating the conditions off of your baseline here yeah your other dream so it's a three hour. happened outside conditions for ten six hundred i t which is what's being projected at the oh yeah that's billion or around twenty feet deep and they nine hundred twenty one hundred so that's what they rejected by the i.p.c.c. with the temperature we take the temperature values from now and be a tank and then we apply plus one degree offset perhaps twenty fifty set of conditions and a plus two degree offset for at twenty one hundred which is that level of control and manipulation is available to every experimental room at the sea some facility and all of their tanks it's a system that requires nearly one hundred kilometers of piping seven hundred to

eight hundred thousand liters of new seawater daily and a computer system that not only must keep water temperatures and ph levels accurate to within one hundredth of one percent but also controls it all through the touch of a button keeping it all running twenty four seven is the job of operations manager craig humphrey they just for example bring up an experiment that is looking at climate train generations immigration ok so the example here is that we have the. temperature one each one of these rectangles represents a tank with an ordinary coal or a function of has a somethings or some of the tanks that we've already looked out exactly so temperature one is indicated by these color rectangles each color represents a different page ok there is a different concentration of c o two yes exactly so what we have in this are we have four different temperatures here for different pages and every combination of these sixteen different water is running into this room so i'll just let

temperature three for example i can see the red thanks for trying to and that's it for any given up time but all of the cutting edge research that system's technology and engineering now allows ultimately one thing stands out we've never been able to run such a long time experiments because the quality of the water liquid quality of the controls but sophisticated enough that we could actually produce offspring after all it's not whether the corals on the reef today will be able to adapt and exist on the reefs of two thousand and fifty and twenty one hundred it's whether their descendants will researchers are seeking to determine not just whether corals can be conditioned to withstand future ocean conditions but whether those manipulated corals can pass those survival traits on to future generations the process is known as assisted evolution so the main goal to assess the evolution for a day is to develop still. hasn't monsters to quantitate so it's better to withstand five hundred from the city because. if we can perhaps mix from

the from the skeleton fossil grown process i did an ideal world all of the about madeline van op and is a principal research scientist at ames and leads its assisted evolution program and how are you going about this to walk me through some of the nuts and bolts of how this research goes about we are and crossing different stages. and the rationale was at home like meat. i provide new characteristics to that but they can and the major. when we were in the senate three grown these high risk pools on the predict the future ocean this isn't base where you have nothing else left and think those individuals that perform for they go out i'm really curious about this how do you go about the cross-fertilization what are the what are the mechanics involved in reading a form yes a person would need to send the team out to the rig so to collect poll phone use

that have ritual x. so we need to go around and pick those companies that are ready to go. as seen in this video shot at regular speed the collected coral colonies are brought back to the sea simulator to spawn. the corals packaged both sperm and egg into what are called bundles when they are ready to release the coral pushes the bundles through the mouth openings of their polyps creating a distinct visual image under some of my christmas space like decorated christmas presents waiting with them nobody wanted releases those bomb no stay close to the surface of the bed and we kind of scoop them up and separate various some. back and remember to bring them into our rearing area the bundles are than separated into sperm and egg and crossbred according to the breeding match scientists wish to attain selected sperm and egg are reintroduced to each other through and in vitro process two hours later fertilization is complete and what are now coral larvae are

moved into rearing tanks were dr lena berry looks after them while they are at their most vulnerable so point out to me what i'm looking at i mean you these look like little dust particles but they're baby corn that's exactly right and each one of those can grow into a food and a car or you. lucky enough to find the right spot on the right and that they have the right conditions so therefore it is old that's what's going to happen come next so now we're going to take these small larvae and we're going to actually expose some to a very hot temperatures to see whether we can identify when it's under these conditions that whole afternoon it's all over and individuals from from this bunch in here all right and you're doing that just next door just over here all right so baby coral go from those tanks over there and they wind up here yeah that's right so we have the nursery on one side and over here is the sauna say this is not this is

essentially where we space the lab it's a very warm water and we did that for about three days to see which ones survive not all coral spawn them. labs are crossbred some are simply manipulated or evolved but the endgame is the same all right so this is one of the rooms where you're you have an experiment running and i see these little plugs with teeny tiny little world where these guys are so important this this little corner somebody you know and but it was initially it several dozen it's a lot of those bratz here in the sea simulator and hopefully and then another two years this and this whole actually able to reproduce itself with the project that you have going on i mean it seems to me like it's it's very solutions oriented right i mean a lot of the time you know scientists are are documenting the decline of a system and that can be a very demoralizing thing to do but in this case here you're trying to come up with

a solution here what is in your opinion what is the end game of of your research what is the final result here are we are you driven to action i think is first that we could improve the success of requests and i certainly am but also we hope that we will be able to increase resilience around the family how things are in systems vibrating maybe some more some of those snow and hans poles you know releasing them into the barn the breeding with the native. we would hope that that would increase resilience and loosen them up so negatively and that for over two goldberg the threat to coral reefs goes beyond simply the concerns of scientists when you take what coal race represents to paypal and this is the amazing numbers right so there's an estimated five hundred million people on the planet who come to

call results on a daily basis to get food and income now that's about one in every twelve people that is dependent on coral reefs worldwide four hours north of the. facility is the port city of cannes the primary maritime gateway to the great barrier reef more than two million people visit the great barrier reef every year many of them beginning their tour right here and that's what we're here to do to see the reef through the eyes of those who make it an economic engine as well as an ecological one. call mackenzie is the executive director of the association of marine park tourism operators his job is to represent the interests of the g b r's tourism industry both with the government and with the scientific community look there is no doubt that tourism is the backbone of the of the canes region and that's underpinned by the fact that something like justin came to sixteen thousand people

employed in the marine tourism industry across the whole industry it's a six billion dollar industry and employs about sixty three thousand people it's a six billion dollar industry that's huge that's six billion a year just billion a year just to queensland in the last especially last couple of years with a follow up of a huge leaching event that was reported in the media you know the great barrier reef has really received a lot of attention what do you think about all that publicity that's coming your way or one of the publisher he was incredibly negative and also untruthful. we had stories of know what he's free to say the real thing dayton dawning and we've seen stories where people are written the hero bitchery through the great barrier reef how has that impacted the tourism activities in the perception of tourism here in cannes bleaching event happened this year so like in the season that most people who are already booked their trips to coming out so we've had a really good tourism season i worry about next year and next year is where the

people who were sitting in in america or in in europe are going to go or should we go the barrier reef should we go somewhere else the morning that i choose to go see the reef from myself. starts off ominously a squall pushes through cans luckily blowing out just as quickly as it blew in. like the thousands of travelers from around the world to each day i book a trip on one of the reef leads boats the vessel is the reef test the captain is mark albert. the rate we're going to today is briggs right. thirty nautical miles southeast of cannes saw it we go to on briggs right is about six made his day perfect for in tried but all around briggs rife is water that's thirty five to forty make is they so you have the snow ice cold water that's coming up in the race bring all these nutrients into the right excellent sought for fish and flight simming in an aquarium the trip out to briggs' reef is about an hour and forty

minutes and without land markers it's seemingly a trip to the middle of the ocean until you arrive and the water settles and you are able to see just under the surface and the perspective of where you are and how large it is begins to settle it. once for moored it's a simple equation the quicker you get in the water the more time you get to spend there. it's not working out dive boat that we're on right now michael great barrier reef is one of the world's leading natural treasures ready to shine for sure i'm super frivolous and i'm going to bow to i'm about to dive off a boat ready to dive there check out the amazing coral reef it's a bucket list that i checked off true for you. from above the water surface the break could be a brief appearance majestic but still. the corals looking like rocks for which they

are often mistaken. it's when you get beneath the surface of the water that you are truly able to appreciate what's meant by the phrase rain forest of the. we're diving in the middle third of the great barrier reef which has been largely spared the devastation felt by the g.b. has northern third there are signs of bleaching but overall the reef is beautiful and full of life. for myself it's especially rewarding to see the contents of the ames mizo cozzens full life out in their natural environment. so i am the absolute last person out of the water it was amazing down there we saw the fan corals graeme corals we saw all sorts of fish chaya clams probably could

have stayed there for another couple or hours but exhausting lunch back ends and off we go. we've returned to cannes with the rest of the briefly and the thousands of tourists they ferried to one of the world's natural wonders for many it was their first time visiting the g.b. are the looming question will this generation be the last we're able to do so for those who seek to save the reef through science and for those whose livelihoods depend upon it the answer is no provided that action is taken if we continue on a current path way where we're pumping c o two into the atmosphere worth it if i mean oceans we won't have coral reefs within twenty thirty forty years from now business as usual is going to be devastating but even if we do something to halt or to mitigate some of the impacts of climate change we're as a as a human society going to have to live with the fact that we're going to lose

a lot of coral reefs all right we're going to lose a lot of color race but there's no doubt about it if we if we followed the paris agreement where we cut greenhouse gases such that temperatures don't rise above two degrees that could well below its estimate it will still lose ninety percent of coral reefs but the important thing is that if we don't. fulfill the powers agreement. they were mid century they go and i think we're going to have a good healthy rate for the next five ten years maybe even longer even if we don't do much more than what we're currently doing but if we really want to come to grips with it we've got to. we want people to think that there is some hope and there is . there is hope i think that. is incredible in the trouble it can cause but it's also incredible in terms of the solutions and the fixes that it can find there are solutions. and the great barrier is still you know saveable most

of that we can cite but we've got to start now and it's with. that we've got to really get. while the great barrier reef may have been written prematurely those calling for action on his behalf to their warnings along. with the science and society in time is something the future. will tell the techno. next time. a new level of luxury has arrived. an experience that will transform the way he transformed. our impeccable service remains but now comes with breaking heat is a. revolutionary business clients. the old pharmacy for the sea

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