⚡TL;DR
Based in Australia, the Forever Reef Project is the world’s first living coral biobank - a “coral ark” preserving live coral species, tissue, and DNA so we don’t lose them forever.
🌍 The slowest death happening too quickly. Half the world’s reefs are already gone. The rest are bleaching, breaking, and fading fast and even the most heroic conservation and restoration efforts can’t keep up. The entire marine ecosystem (including humans) are dependent upon the reefs. This is a catastrophic problem.
🧬 The reef resistance. From climate-proof coral farms to global cryobanks to reef rebuilders underwater, scientists and divers are racing to sustain and preserve the ocean’s genetic library.
🙌 Why We Say Hell Yeah. The fight to save our oceans will last many more generations into the future - even after the reefs die out. But humanity will never even get the chance if we can’t save and preserve the coral’s DNA now… while they’re still alive. The Forever Reef is the existential “backup drive” to give us the possibility of saving or perhaps starting anew.
Beautiful, massive, vital, and fragile…
As we learned in elementary school, coral isn’t a rock - it’s an animal. A colonial organism made up of thousands (sometimes millions) of tiny creatures called polyps. The Great Barrier Reef off of Australia is the largest living structure on Earth, stretching over 2,300 kilometers (1,400 miles) - longer than the distance from Los Angeles to Seattle. It’s so vast that it can be seen from space and covers roughly 344,000 square kilometers - about the size of Japan.
And as we learned in Finding Nemo, the reef is incredibly vital for marine life (and traumatic childhood experiences for curious clownfish). They provide habitat for 25% of known marine species and provide needed barriers and relief for coastal communities. Without the reef, all life dependent upon the ocean will be drastically and utterly affected. Chaos would ultimately ensue.
And for being so massive, they are incredibly fragile. Most reef-building corals thrive in a narrow temperature band: 23–29°C (73–84°F). A sustained increase of just 1°C above normal for several weeks can cause mass bleaching, where corals expel their algae and starve.
Image courtesy Pacificans.com
…and dying.
As you might have heard once or twice, global temperatures are rising, which means ocean temperatures are rising, which means coral is getting massacred.
Globally, cover-coral on reef systems declined by about 14% between 2009 and 2018, that’s roughly 11,700 sq. km. lost in less than a decade. (LINK) For size comparison that’s 2.2 billion football fields (or slightly larger than the size of Portugal) of dead ecosystems in the time between when Taylor Swift & Kanye at the VMAs and when she released “Reputation.” (Is it concerning that Dan only writes Taylor Swift analogies?)
The world has already lost 50% of coral reefs since 1950, and scientists project 70–90% more loss at 1.5°C of warming. (LINK) The marine ecosystem is on life support.
The ocean’s insurance policy
Coral restoration is hard. It’s sprawling, underwater, and scary with all those fishies there (yikes!). Even the fastest restoration techniques can’t match the speed of destruction. Corals grow roughly 1–10 cm per year; heatwaves can wipe out entire systems in weeks. And global temps are getting worse, not better.
It’s why the work of the Forever Reef Project is so critical. While we fully applaud all restoration efforts (see below), most scientists are realistic that this problem won’t be solved in our lifetime. By creating an “ark” for living coral species, we can try to rebuild again many years from now. This is less similar to the dusty backup drives living in your closet holding copies of that Gin and Juice cover you downloaded from Napster 25 years ago. This is more akin to that dope Doomsday Seed Vault in Norway that’s keeping our plant’s DNA safe for years.
The living biobank at The Forever Reef Project. Divers collect coral from the reef, microchip each specimen, and store it alive under precise conditions.
But unlike seeds, coral needs to stay alive. Operated by Great Barrier Reef Legacy, the Forever Reef is the world’s first living coral biobank, a physical archive of coral species, cryopreserved tissue, and live fragments maintained in a futuristic facility in Port Douglas. It operates as a public tourist attraction, not only providing more funding for research; but also merging science and story telling to make the reef’s crisis more tangible. Part lab, part museum, part time capsule.
We also want to recognize some of the great efforts happening now to preserve the coral reefs. Two initiatives we like are:
Coral Vita in the Bahamas is a for-profit reef farm that grows climate-resilient coral 50× faster using microfragmentation, cutting coral into tiny shards that fuse as they grow.
Coral Restoration Foundation in the Florida Keys which is the largest nonprofit reef restoration on the planet running a underwater coral nursery, with 40,000 outplants per year - clipping and replanting like sea gardeners.
⚡Why we said hell yeah!
We here at Hell Yeah HQ are passionate about the world’s biggest problems, and the moonshot solutions to solving them.
And the coral dying is a catastrophic problem. Not just for Pixar clownfish, but for people. Nearly a billion people rely on the reef for employment, storm barriers, and food for countless communities. Not to mention snorkeling tourism.
And we don’t know if there is a solution right now that will stop the coral from dying. But we are confident that humans will figure out how to rebuild eventually. Which is what makes the work of the Forever Reef Project so imperative. By saving and preserving living samples of all of the Earth’s coral species, we will give future generations the specimen bank to keep trying.
So for us, the Hell Yeah here is the realism that sometimes the best innovation isn’t with a technological Hail Mary; but with a time capsule that can give future humans a fighting chance as the ocean temperatures and our technology evolves to a more conducive spot for coral. It’s an insurance policy, a modern Noah’s Ark, as well as a learning laboratory to help us preserve our oceans for the next half billion years. Hell Yeah!
Dive in Deeper
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