Enormous pumice “raft” arrives on Australia’s east coast - from Great Barrier Reef to northern New South Wales

7 News, 21 August 2020:

An enormous pumice “raft” has arrived on Australia’s east coast, bringing with it new marine life that could help with the recovery of the Great Barrier Reef.

The massive floating sheet of volcanic rock was first spotted by Australian sailors on August 9, 2019, days after an underwater volcano is believed to have erupted near the Pacific island of Tonga.

Australian sailors Michael Hoult and Larissa Brill said at the time they encountered volcanic rocks “made up of pumice stones from marble to basketball size such that water was not visible”.

The raft is more than 150 square kilometres in surface area - almost three times the size of Sydney Harbour or about 8000 football fields.

It is now crashing into Australia’s east coast between Townsville and northern New South Wales.

Pumice is a lightweight, bubbly rock, formed when frothy magma cools suddenly.

The rock can float on the surface of the water and it often houses tiny reef-building animals.

Associate Professor Scott Bryan, collecting pumice on North Stradbroke Island. Credit: Anthony Weate/QUT

“Each piece of pumice is a rafting vehicle,” Queensland University of Technology geologist Scott Bryan said in a statement.

“This is about a boost of new recruits, of new corals and other reef-building organisms, that happens every five years or so.

“It’s almost like a vitamin shot for the Great Barrier Reef.”.....

The Great Barrier Reef is a nursery for Queensland & News South Wales fisheries and we are still failing to adequately protect its coral structure and marine biodiversity

"Healthy coral reefs are among the most biologically diverse and economically valuable ecosystems on earth, providing valuable and vital ecosystem services. Coral ecosystems are a source of food for millions; protect coastlines from storms and erosion; provide habitat, spawning and nursery grounds for economically important fish species; provide jobs and income to local economies from fishing, recreation, and tourism; are a source of new medicines, and are hotspots of marine biodiversity." [UCSanDiego, Scripps Insitution of Oceanography]

Go to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation website and you be presented with links to a "Kids Corner", visual tours and various 'projects', some of which were unrealised or unsuccessful.

A website visitor will also find that the foundation has not published online an annual report since 2018 - the year the Turnbull Government announced that this small foundation was to receive $443 million dollars in federal funding.

However, it did publish the Annual Work Plan 2019-2020.

The Foundation rarely rates a mention in the mainstream media these days. 

This is the latest news report is from The Guardian on 11 July 2020:

The Great Barrier Reef Foundation has raised only $21.7m out of a target of $357m in donations more than two years after it was awarded the largest single environmental grant in Australian history. 

It has prompted Labor to call for greater transparency from the foundation about its fundraising, while the Greens have said the figure “makes a mockery of the government’s logic” for awarding the grant. 

The charity controversially received $443m for reef projects in 2018, with the government defending its decision at the time by saying the private foundation would leverage the funds to attract further investment in reef restoration and science from the private sector. 

The foundation released an investment strategy in October 2018 that set a target of $357m to be raised over five years, bringing the total reef investment to $800m.  
The target is made up of $200m in contributed funds from research and project partners, and $157m in cash donations from a capital campaign ($100m), corporate giving ($50m) and individual donations ($7m). 

In response to questions from Guardian Australia, the foundation said it had raised $21.7m in in-kind donations from research and project partners, about 6% of the total $357m target. 

It has raised none of the $100m from the capital campaign and refused to provide any figures to show how it was tracking towards targets for corporate giving and individual donations. 

A spokeswoman said the Covid-19 pandemic had now “made the fundraising environment more challenging and uncertain for many not-for-profits across Australia and around the world”. 

In-kind contributions are non-cash donations, which a foundation spokeswoman said included things such as a farmer donating time to work on a water quality project, or a project partner supplying equipment such as a boat. 

“Cash is what we need to fund science projects and offer grants for community projects,” said Peter Whish-Wilson, the Greens senator who chaired a parliamentary inquiry into the awarding of the grant. 

“The kind of funds they’re seeking, yes it’s potentially lumpy and can take time to raise. But I would have thought they would have at least $50m to $100m by now. 

“It makes a mockery of the government’s logic and intent giving nearly half a billion of taxpayer money to a small private foundation on the basis they would raise dollar for dollar co-contributions from the private sector.”.... 

“Our fundraising target was $157m, of which $100m was to support the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program which was launched in April 2020,” the foundation’s managing director, Anna Marsden, said in a statement to Guardian Australia. 

“With this program now finalised and as per the strategy outlined in the collaborative investment plan, fundraising revenue is expected to start to be realised from the third year of the partnership.” 

However, the investment plan states the foundation had intended to raise 60% of that $100m across years two (2019-2020) and three (2020-2021) of the strategy. 

The foundation refused to answer questions about how much it had raised of the remaining $57m made up of corporate giving and individual donations. 

The foundation’s spokeswoman told Guardian Australia there had been some donations in these categories but the organisation would not be supplying figures.....

Read the full artcile here.

BACKGROUND


https://youtu.be/E1BvLMhQLZA 

Drone footage captures tens of thousands of sea turtles off Australia's Great Barrier Reef

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 29 June 2020: 

Literally cooked in hot water—what happened in the latest mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.... 

Coral bleaching is no longer rare, and no longer confined to a few tidal pools. 

Instead, mass coral bleaching, in which many reefs are affected, has now occurred on the Great Barrier five times in the last 23 years. Three of these events were within the past five years, most recently in the summer of 2020. Bleaching is happening much more frequently, and much more intensively. My colleagues at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, James Cook University, and I—along with many others—have been studying these coral bleaching events in an effort to find out more about what factors are driving corals to bleach, whether the Reef can overcome them by itself—and what humankind can hope to do to help the corals. The findings, so far, are bleak—even more so than when I first wrote about coral bleaching for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2016.... 

Corals are most at risk of such thermal stress in high summer, when water temperatures are at their local seasonal maximum. 

They live only 1-to-2 degrees Celsius (about 1.8-to-3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) below their threshold for heat tolerance, so unusually warm waters over a matter of even just a few weeks is sufficient to cause them to bleach.... 

Different coral species respond to thermal stress differently, with the fast-growing branching corals more susceptible, and slower-growing massive corals more tolerant. The appearance and makeup of coral communities after severe bleaching becomes flatter and less diverse as the corals responsible for the complex three-dimensional structures succumb more readily to heat stress. 

There are obvious follow-on effects to the reef-associated organisms which rely on live, healthy corals for their survival. Restoring a reef to its healthy pre-bleaching state is possible but it takes time: time for surviving corals to regain their algal partners and continue to grow; time for coral larvae to be produced on the reef or be imported from nearby unaffected reefs. 

About 10 years without disturbance is required for such recovery and this is just not happening on the Great Barrier Reef. Since 1985, a unique long-term monitoring program has regularly assessed the condition of a subset of reefs. Measurements of the amount of hard coral cover show that the Great Barrier Reef can recover from disturbances such as bleaching, tropical cyclones, Crown-of-Thorns Starfish outbreaks and diseases but that there are limits to their ability to bounce back; overall, there has been a widespread ratcheting down of coral cover. Almost every part of the Great Barrier Reef has suffered some major environmental disturbance in recent times. 

And there is nowhere for the corals to hide.....

Read the full article here.

How the world sees Australia's response to climate change

It seems it isn't just our Pacific island neighbours or other members of the United Nations which view Australia as a nation governed by backward environmental vandals intent on destroying their own country.....

https://youtu.be/m6DO3zbD83U


Channel 4 News is made for Channel 4 by Independent Television Network Ltd. Channel 4 is a publicly-owned and commercially-funded UK public service broadcaster.

It is reported that Channel 4 has a monthly audience reach of est. 79% of all UK television viewers.

This is the gist of a 13 minute news segment aired in Britain on 12 November 2019 and, which had over 17 million views on YouTube:

Despite briefly boasting more than 50% renewable power generation on its national grid this year, Australia is struggling to move on from an energy, labour and political market built on a 1950s coal-based model. (Subscribe: https://bit.ly/C4_News_Subscribe) Even as eastern Australia is consumed by flames after years of drought, the New South Wales parliament is today trying to push through a law to stop proposed coal mines from having to examine the carbon impact of the coal they’re exporting. And they’re exporting a lot. Australia's coal export market is the most lucrative on the planet, valued at £36 billion. Three people have been killed, over 150 homes destroyed, Sydney faces ‘catastrophic’ conditions, and at least 45 of the 65 fires burning through the region are out of control. Yet when Australian Green MPs suggest the industry is on the wrong side of history, they get called 'raving loonies’ by the Deputy Prime Minister. Australia is now among the very worst G20 keepers of promises made in the Paris Climate Accord. It plans seven giant new opencast pits for Queensland, even as the bush to the east is incinerated by drought caused by climate change, caused by carbon emission caused - in part - by coal.

UPDATE

The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 November 2019:

Sweden's central bank has sold off bonds from parts of Australia and the oil-rich Canadian province of Alberta because it felt that greenhouse gas emissions in both countries were too high.

Riksbank Deputy Governor Martin Floden said on Wednesday the bank would no longer invest in assets from issuers with a large climate footprint, even if the yields were high.

Sydney Uni Business School Professor Sandra van der Laan: Adani Group's Australia operations effectively insolvent

Image: BBC, 29.11.18

Financial Review,

The Adani Carmichael coal mine set to be built in Queensland’s Galilee Basin has courted controversy like no other project in recent memory. 

Central and northern Queenslanders and MPs alike have lauded the jobs and economic stimulus the project promises to provide. Elsewhere, others scratched their heads as to why the country needed to build a brand new coal mine right next to the iconic Great Barrier Reef. At the same time that Australia tries to meet its Paris climate targets, no less.

KEY POINTS

Adani’s Australian operations could be on the brink of collapse before its Carmichael coalmine is ever built, a forensic accountant has claimed to the ABC.

Professor Sandra van der Laan examined the limited publicly-available financial statements from the private company and concluded that the company was in “a very fragile, even perilous, financial position”.

Adani was quick to reject the claims, slamming them as “false and misleading” and the latest in a series of attacks aimed to destroy the Australian project.

The Adani Carmichael coal mine set to be built in Queensland’s Galilee Basin has courted controversy like no other project in recent memory.

Despite battling for eight years to be approved, receiving the final environmental green light last month, the project finally looked to be going ahead. 

But now, a forensic accountant has warned that the divisive Adani Carmichael coal mine could be on the brink of collapse before it even begins operation. 

University of Sydney Professor Sandra van der Laan has sounded the alarm on the project after analysing Adani’s financial standing.

“It looks to me like a corporate collapse waiting to happen,” she told the ABC. “It has all the hallmarks of the big corporate failures we’ve seen over the last 20 to 30 years.” 

She should know — van der Laan has a track record of picking corporate collapses. It was she and colleague Sue Newberry who warned in 2007 that ABC Learning, Australia’s biggest private childcare provider at the time and the world’s largest publically listed childcare company, was heading for disaster.....

“Adani Mining is in a very fragile, even perilous, financial position,” van der Laan told the ABC. “The gap between the current assets and liabilities is what’s really concerning.” 

According to Adani’s most recent financial statements, provided to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) in March this year, that gap is enormous. The ABC reports that the business’ liabilities exceed its assets by more than half a billion dollars. 

Moreover, the ABC reports that the company will have $1.8 billion in liabilities come due over the next 12 months, compared with just $30 million in assets. Those liabilities are largely made up by an internal loan from parent company Adani Global on which the van der Laan says the Australian operation is reliant. That’s because the Australian mine was forced to self-fund after banks and wealth funds turned their back on it. 

“Effectively on paper, they are insolvent,” van der Laan said. "I wouldn’t be trading with them, as simple as that. I wouldn’t have anything to do with them."....

Great Barrier Reef Marine Authority makes its position clear to Australian governments

SBS News, 20 July 2019:

The agency that manages the Great Barrier Reef broke ranks with the Federal Government to call for the "strongest and fastest possible action" against climate change to save the world heritage marine wonder.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, a government body, said in a study released this week that an urgent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, both nationally and globally, was needed to protect the future of the reef.

Rising sea temperatures linked to climate change have killed off large areas of coral in the 2,300km reef, a UN-listed World Heritage site, that suffered back-to-back coral bleaching in 2016 and 2017.

Australia's emissions of greenhouse gases have risen for the past four years under the recently re-elected government of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, which backs the country's huge coal industry.

It has refused to enshrine emission reduction targets agreed to under the Paris climate accords in its formal energy policy and experts question whether it can meet its commitment to cut greenhouse gas output by at least 26 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Great Barrrier Reef Marine Authority (GBRMA):

On 18 July 2019, the Authority released our position statement on climate change.

Our position is:

Climate change is the greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef. Only the strongest and fastest possible actions to decrease global greenhouse gas emissions will reduce the risks and limit the impacts of climate change on the Reef. Further impacts can be minimised by limiting global temperature increase to the maximum extent possible and fast-tracking actions to build Reef resilience.

The position statement explains what is causing the climate to change, why it’s the greatest threat to the Reef, and that caring for the Reef requires actions at all levels.

Caring for the Reef is a shared responsibility. We recognise the critical importance of strong and effective implementation of all government programs, policies and tools supporting action on climate change. We encourage others to take action to reduce the risks and limit the impacts of climate change on the Reef and coral reefs globally. Actions everyone can take can be found on our website and the Department of the Environment and Energy’s website.

Building the resilience of the Reef is central to ensuring it can withstand threats. Our approach to managing the Marine Park is adaptive and future-focused and we are committed to strengthening partnerships to build the capacity of Marine Park managers, industries and communities to adapt their activities to a changing climate....

Morrison Government's newly appointed “Special Envoy” for the Great Barrier Reef is in favour of large scale land clearing on the reef's doorstep

This is the newly appointed “Special Envoy” for the Great Barrier Reef, Liberal MP for Leichhardt Warren Entsch…..

The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 June 2019:

Coalition MP Warren Entsch has backed a plan to bulldoze 2000 hectares of pristine forest near the Great Barrier Reef despite being appointed to a role championing the natural marine wonder.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison appointed the veteran Liberal MP, who represents the seat of Leichhardt in north Queensland, as special envoy to the Great Barrier Reef in last month’s ministerial reshuffle.

Mr Entsch once owned Olive Vale station, a large Cape York farm north-west of Cairns, and has been a vocal proponent of land clearing on farming properties in north Queensland. Land clearing can create sediment and nutrient run-off and is the main driver of serious water quality problems on the Great Barrier Reef.

Liberal MP Warren Entsch is a strong advocate of land clearing, despite the possible effects on the Great Barrier Reef's water quality.

In particular, Mr Entsch lobbied his government on behalf of a highly contentious proposal to clear 2000 hectares of forest at Kingvale Station on Cape York Peninsula.

The land drains into two rivers that run into the Great Barrier Reef 200 kilometres downstream. Government-commissioned experts have warned that soil erosion from the work is likely to damage the reef.

Mr Entsch told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that despite his new responsibilities, the Kingvale land-clearing proposal had his “total support”.

“It has absolutely nothing to do with my role [as reef envoy],” he said…..

New Environment Minister Sussan Ley will decide on the Kingvale plan, which is being assessed under Commonwealth laws.

This is what Mr. Entsch is determined to ignore……

The relationship between the position of Kingvale Station in a river catchment which discharges water into the Great Barrier Reef at a point where the reef is under stress from multiple coral bleaching events.

Normanby Catchment in Far North Queensland

Kingvale Station approximate position maked in red

Map found at Great Barrier Reef Foundation

Warren Entsch cannot be ignorant of this relationship, as Kingvale Station is in the federal electorate he has held for the last twenty-three years.

A suspicious person might wonder if Mr. Entsch was one of the government MPs who allegedly 'lobbied' departmental staff on the matter of Kingvale Station land clearing consent in the past,

Such a mind might also ponder the proposition that he was made Special Envoy for the Great Barrier Reef in order to assist in subverting attempts to stop landclearing so close to this World Heritage listed marine area.

BACKGROUND

ABC News, 22 May 2018:

The Queensland Government has launched legal action against the owner of a Cape York cattle station at the centre of a land-clearing controversy for allegedly breaching an obligation to care for Indigenous heritage.

The owner of Kingvale Station on the Cape York Peninsula legally cleared 500 hectares of land before the Federal Government intervened in 2016, over internal concerns about the effect on sediment run-off into the Great Barrier Reef.

The traditional owners of the land, the Olkola people, claim the owner of Kingvale Station went ahead with the clearing without their knowledge and may have destroyed a burial site.

The ABC can reveal the Queensland Department of Environment and Science is taking court action as a result of an investigation which started as early as 2016, when the Olkola people complained to the Government that they believed Kingvale Station may be in breach of the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 November 2018:

The Morrison government has conceded it botched scrutiny of a plan to bulldoze 2000 hectares of pristine Queensland forest near the Great Barrier Reef and has been forced back to the drawing board following a legal challenge by conservationists.

The development comes as confidential documents show government MPs lobbied environmental officials to wave through the proposal, which would raze land almost three times the size of the combined central business districts of Sydney and Melbourne.

As Fairfax Media reported in May, the Department of the Environment and Energy in a draft report recommended that the government allow the mass vegetation clearing at Kingvale Station on Cape York Peninsula.

The finding, which prompted public outrage, came despite the department conceding the native forest was likely to contain endangered species, and despite expert warnings that runoff caused by the clearing may damage the Great Barrier Reef.

Environmental Defenders Office NSW (EDO NSW), media release, 27 November 2018: 

In a case demonstrating the critical role community organisations play in holding elected officials to account,  the Federal Court has upheld a challenge by the Environment Council of Central Queensland (ECOCeQ) – represented by EDO NSW – to a proposal to clear 2,100 ha of native vegetation on Kingvale Station on the Cape York Peninsula in the Great Barrier Reef catchment.

Early in 2018, the Federal Minister for the Environment decided that the proposed clearing could undergo the least rigorous form of environmental assessment available under Commonwealth environmental law.  The Minister was required, among other things, to be satisfied that the degree of public concern about the action is, or is expected to be, ‘moderately low’.

The Minister has now conceded that decision was not made lawfully. 

ENVISAT satellite image of the Great Barrier Reef alongside the York Peninsula.

“The Act deliberately applies a strict test that must be satisfied before the Minister can opt for the least rigorous assessment,” David Morris, CEO of EDO NSW, stated.

The Government’s own experts found that the proposed clearing would have a significant impact on the Great Barrier Reef and a number of threatened species.

The Minister must now go back to the drawing board to decide afresh how the environmental impacts of the proposal will be assessed. Steps that have been completed since the Minister made the original assessment decision are now void, including the Secretary’s draft recommendation report that was published online for comment in April 2018.

What follows next will depend on the assessment methodology selected by the Minister. Whichever approach is selected, there will be further opportunity for the public to comment on the proposed clearing.

Christine Carlisle, President of ECOCeQ, said ‘We hope the Minister rejects the tree clearing proposal outright, since it will destroy habitat for threatened species, the bulldozing of the forest will contribute to climate change, and there can be no guarantee that sediment run-off from this huge area will not make its way into Princess Charlotte Bay and then on to the Reef.’  

‘We trust that the Minister for the Environment will act in the best interest of the environment, and not rubber stamp this dangerous proposal. The Minister received 6,000 public comments when this clearing was first proposed, and I hope the public responds again to ensure this proposal is not approved at any level,’ she said.

This case illustrates yet again the value of the extended standing provisions in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. Without community groups like ECoCeQ, and lawyers to represent them, this unlawful decision would have proceeded without scrutiny and key safeguards for our environment ignored.

Lobby group giving farmers a bad name

The Guardian, 2 May 2019:

The Queensland farm lobby AgForce has deleted more than a decade worth of data from a government program that aims to improve water quality in the Great Barrier Reef, in response to state government moves to introduce new reef protection laws.

Guardian Australia revealed in June that the state’s auditor general had raised concerns that agriculture industry groups had refused to share data from the “best management practices” program due to privacy concerns.

In recent months, AgForce and others had campaigned against the imposition of new reef protection regulations, which set sediment “load limits” in reef catchments and impose new standards on farmers.

The proposed new laws, which have been introduced to state parliament, also include a provision to allow the environment minister to obtain data from agricultural groups……

The Queensland environment minister, Leeanne Enoch, told the Courier-Mail the decision flushed “so much work and the taxpayer dollars that have been supporting it out to sea”.

“AgForce often claims that they are true environmentalists but this decision is not the action of a group that wants to protect the environment,” she said.

The Queensland audit office last year found that the success of the best management practices program could not be properly measured because the agricultural groups that receive government funding would not provide data on whether producers had actually improved their practices.

“This detailed information is currently held by the industry groups,” the report said. “Despite this work being funded by government, the information is not provided to government due to privacy concerns from the industry.

“These data restrictions mean government does not have full visibility of the progress made and cannot measure the degree of practice change or assess the value achieved from its investment of public funds.

“This means that the reported proportion of lands managed using best management practice systems could be overstated.”

Is the Great Barrier Reef not dying quickly enough for the Morrison Government and Australian Environment Minister Melissa Price? Are they trying to hasten its death?

Australia's Great Barrier Reef has been under threat from increased human activity for generations.

Sediment runoff due to land clearing and agrigultual activity, pollutants from commercial shipping, unlawful discharge of waste water from mining operations and coral bleaching due to climate change.

North Queensland Bulk Ports Corporation is a port authority responsible for facilities at Weipa, Abbot Point, Mackay and Hay Point trading ports, and the non-trading port of Maryborough.

Three of these ports are in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area. One of these, Hay Point is reportedly among the largest coal export points in the world.

This is what the Morrison Government's Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has given this corporation permission to do.............

The Guardian, 20 February 2019:

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has approved the dumping of more than 1m tonnes of dredge spoil near the reef, using a loophole in federal laws that were supposed to protect the marine park.

The Greens senator Larissa Waters has called for the permit – which allows maintenance dredging to be carried out over 10 years at Mackay’s Hay Point port and the sludge to be dumped within the marine park’s boundaries – to be revoked.

“The last thing the reef needs is more sludge dumped on it, after being slammed by the floods recently,” Waters said. “One million tonnes of dumping dredged sludge into world heritage waters treats our reef like a rubbish tip.”

Acting on concerns from environmentalists, the federal government banned the disposal of dredge spoil near the reef in 2015. But the ban applied only to capital dredging. Maintenance work at ports – designed to remove sediment from shipping lanes as it accumulates – is not subject to it.

On 29 January the marine park authority granted conditional approval for North Queensland Bulk Ports to continue to dump maintenance dredge spoil within the park’s boundaries. The permit was issued just days before extensive flooding hit north and central Queensland, spilling large amounts of sediment into the marine environment.

Waters said the distinction between capital and maintenance dredging made little difference to the reef…..

North Queensland Bulk Ports, in a statement posted online shortly after the permit was issued, said it had to meet conditions to protect the marine environment. The ports authority said its dumping plan was peer-reviewed and considered best practice.

“Just like roads, shipping channels require maintenance to keep ports operating effectively,” the ports authority said. “Maintenance dredging involves relocating sediment which travels along the coast and accumulates over the years where our shipping operation occurs.

“Importantly, our assessment reports have found the risks to protected areas including the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and sensitive habitats are predominantly low with some temporary, short-term impacts to (bottom-dwelling) habitat possible.

“The permits allow for the long-term, sustainable management of maintenance dredging at the Port and will safeguard the efficient operations of one of Australia’s most critical trading ports.”

Maintenance dredging will begin in late March. Initial dredging will take about 40 days.

BBC, 22 February 2019:

Australia plans to dump one million tonnes of sludge in the Great Barrier Reef.

Despite strict laws on dumping waste, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) gave the go-ahead.

A loophole was found - the laws don't apply to materials generated from port maintenance work.

It comes one week after flood water from Queensland spread into the reef, which scientists say will "smother" the coral.

The industrial residue is dredged from the bottom of the sea floor near Hay Point Port - one of the world's largest coal exports and a substantial economic source for the country....

It's just "another nail in the coffin" for the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef, which is already under stress due to climate change, according to Dr Simon Boxall from the National Oceanography Centre Southampton.

"If they are dumping it over the coral reef itself, it will have quite a devastating effect. The sludge is basically blanketing over the coral.

"The coral relies on the algae, that's what give them their colour and what helps them feed - without this partnership the coral will suffer dramatically."

Dr Boxall says his worries about sludge-dumping are short-term - with the current Australian summer a time for "rapid algae growth".....

Dr Boxall says the impact will be lessened if the sludge is taken far enough offshore, but that it will still contain high amounts of harmful materials such as trace metals.

"If it's put into shallow water it will smother sea life," he says.

"It's important they get it right.

"It'll cost more money but that's not the environment's problem - that's the port authorities' problem."

Last year, Australia pledged A$500 million (£275m) to protect the Great Barrier Reef - which has lost 30% of its coral due to bleaching linked to rising sea temperatures and damage from crown-of-thorns starfish.

One of the threats listed at the time was "large amounts of sediment".

Adani caught red handed breaking the rules - again

In 2017 the foreign multinational, the Adani Group, was found to have released heavily polluted water into coastal wetlands and the ocean around the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area - then lied about it.

Last Sunday it was reported to again be ignoring mining and environmental regulations and very predictably appears to be lying about its actions.

ABC News, 30 December 2018:

Mining firm Adani has unwittingly provided "persuasive" evidence for a Queensland Government investigation into allegedly illegal works on its Carmichael mine site, environmental lawyers say.

The evidence includes specifications of groundwater bores registered by Adani on a government website, which Queensland's Environmental Defenders Office (EDO) said could only be used for prohibited dewatering operations, and not for monitoring as Adani has claimed.

Adani has also confirmed it cleared 5.8 hectares of land when correcting an "administrative error" in its reporting to government, an action the EDO branded unlawful.

A spokeswoman for Adani insisted the company had acted in accordance with its environmental approvals, had not been dewatering for mining operations, and had "cooperated with both relevant State and Commonwealth departments regarding these allegations".

The Department of Environment and Science (DES) began an investigation in September to examine allegations Adani had drilled illegal groundwater bores.

Satellite and drone evidence of drilling was presented to DES by the EDO on behalf of its client, environmental group Coast and Country.

Coast and Country spokesman Derec Davies said the evidence had resulted in an official investigation by the Queensland Government.

"Adani have been caught red handed breaking the law, and then lying about it within official documents," he said.

Dewatering bores are used by miners to prepare for open cut and underground operations.

Conservationists have repeatedly warned that Adani's dewatering plans could threaten the nationally important Doongmabulla Springs.

An Adani spokeswoman said the company had drilled the bores "to take geological samples and monitor underground water levels", which she said was permitted as a stage one activity under its licence.

However, an expert has told the ABC the registrations for five of the bores that appear on a Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy website bear the hallmarks of dewatering bores, not monitoring bores.

They show the bores are constructed with steel rather than plastic casing, were considerably thicker than Adani's registered groundwater monitoring bores and ran deeper at 135 to 273 metres.

The bore reports did not include the baseline underground water level or the elevation of each bore, information considered critical for monitoring.

The five registered bores are also ascribed the abbreviation "DWB", commonly used for dewatering bores, instead of "GMB", commonly used for groundwater monitoring bores.

Read the full article here.