Climate doc Chasing Coral is currently streaming on Netflix.
Back in the 1980s, we started looking at this weird phenomenon: Large sections of coral reefs were turning white, literally over a couple of weeks. And no one really knew why this was,” says University of Queensland professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg in Chasing Coral. “As we did more and more experiments, it turned out that it wasn’t a disease. It wasn’t too much light. And the only thing you could do in an experiment that would cause corals to go white was to raise the temperature by two degrees Celsius.”