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Red Sea Coral Reef
Heat-resistant reefs lining 2,000 kilometres of one of the world's warmest seas
The coral reefs of the Red Sea fringe some 2,000 kilometres of coastline between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, forming one of the longest reef systems on Earth and among its most biologically distinctive. Growing in a narrow, salty, and unusually warm sea, these reefs are remarkable for a quality that has drawn global scientific attention: their corals appear unusually resistant to the heat stress that is bleaching reefs elsewhere, raising hopes that they may serve as a refuge for coral as the oceans warm.
The Red Sea is a young ocean basin, formed where the Arabian and African plates are slowly pulling apart, and its near-total isolation, with only a narrow connection to the Indian Ocean at the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, has produced a marine world found nowhere else. A high share of its fish and corals are endemic. The reefs, built largely of branching acropora and massive porites corals over thousands of years, support more than 300 species of hard coral and over a thousand species of fish amid spectacularly clear, warm water.
For millennia the Red Sea has been a corridor between continents, plied by traders linking the Mediterranean world to the Indian Ocean, and its reefs are woven into the coastal life of Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and beyond. Today they anchor a major diving and tourism industry, especially along the Egyptian coast at Sharm el-Sheikh and Hurghada. Their apparent resilience has made them a focus of urgent research, even as coastal development, warming, and pollution test the limits of that endurance.