The weather conditions in the year 2016 have been at their extremes over many parts of the world. So much so that several records have been broken and the world is only heading towards even warmer weather.
One such country happens to be Australia where both the notorious El Niño and man-made causes including burning of fossil fuels resulted in record-breaking extreme weather conditions. The list of the repercussions is endless.
Not only were there unusual bushfires in regions where such an event doesn’t take place, but also land and sea ecosystems were also destroyed. The bad news doesn’t end here, the country witnessed the worst coral bleaching ever recorded. It seems like this wasn’t enough and salmon stocks, kelp forests and oyster farms across southern parts of Australia also bore the brunt.
While Australia as a whole observed the fourth warmest year on record, conditions were much worse for Darwin and Sydney where records were broken in terms of both extreme maximums as well as minimums.
Bushfires were witnessed in parts of Western Australia, Victoria and Tasmania. In fact, the Tasmanian heritage forests which were damaged due to this happened to be the worst crisis faced in several decades. Brisbane and Hobart recorded the hottest mean temperatures annually.
Sea surface temperatures also suffered a beating as the temperatures were recorded to be at least 0.73 degrees Celsius above the 1961-1990 average. Not only this, at least 22 percent of the coral of the Great Barrier Reef died an unprecedented death.
Image Credit: latrobe.edu.au
