First, I want to thank everyone for the incredible support and love you showed me after last week's blog post. Your comments and messages made me smile this whole week.
Another thing that made me smile this week was the trip I took. On Wednesday, I flew up to Cairns. For those of you in not-Australia, Cairns is a city in the north of Queensland, right on the Great Barrier Reef. I think you know where this is going.
If not, here's a picture I took of a sea turtle:
The Great Barrier Reef has been a dream of mine since I was a little kid. At the very earliest, it was when I was 8 and saw Finding Nemo for the first 10 or so times. I was enchanted by the idea of so much color and diversity in one spot. The distance made it even cooler, but it also made the idea of actually seeing it seem far-fetched.
That is, until I started planning my semester abroad in Australia. With most of the distance already covered, I was able to go up for just a few days. And it was so worth it.
I spent Thursday out on a boat, trying very hard not to get seasick. I got to snorkel at two different locations along the reef and saw some incredible coral, fish, and other sea creatures. Of course, I rented a waterproof camera so I could document the experience.
If this were a different kind of travel blog, I would encourage you to make the trek to the Great Barrier Reef. They didn't crown it a Wonder of the Natural World for nothing.
I would rather talk about how incredible it is that such a complex ecosystem exists on our planet. I saw dozens of species in the few hours I was underwater. There were fish, turtles, clams, coral, and birds. And those are only the ones that I saw. Coral requires very specific conditions to grow and it's wild to me that those conditions actually occur.
I don't want to get all preachy (or maybe I do), but we're steadily ruining those conditions. If water temperatures rise, the coral won't reproduce, which means that the whole ecosystem that relies on coral will disappear. All of those colorful fish, anemones, sharks, turtles, and birds will lose their food and Earth will lose its largest coral reef.
It would be presumptuous of me to offer any solutions, as I am a college student with no expertise in this area. What I can do is ask you to learn about the environment and how best to help protect it. Here is a link to the Australian Marine Conservation Society's website. Feel free to check it out or to do your own research.
Thanks for bearing with me during my foray into eco-blogging (sort of?) As a reward, here are some more pictures I took while snorkeling!
I'll see you next week with a post from not-Australia!
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