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The Ocean in Six Places · Place 01
The Great Barrier Reef
An animal the size of a pinhead built something you can see from space. You have two weeks to find out how.
Seven short chapters · about 15 minutes each · a practice set at the end of every chapter
Start here
What you are walking into
Seven short chapters. Each one has a video, a few photos, something live to play with, and a quick activity. There is very little reading. Do one a day and you are finished in a week.
By the end you will be able to explain why a reef grows where it does, what it is made of, and why the same reef is in trouble for two completely different reasons. You will also have learned a good chunk of college oceanography along the way. We will not make a big deal of that.
Before you start
Watch this first
Tom Park — Jaw-dropping Moments on The Great Barrier Reef. No notes, no questions. Just look at it.
And then this, from space
Sen — The Great Barrier Reef filmed from space by cameras on the International Space Station.
The seven chapters
Your route through the reef
Chapter 1
An Animal Built This
It is 1,400 miles long, it is alive, and it was made by something the size of a pinhead.
Chapter 2
Salt Water Is Not Water
Seawater is 96.5% water. The other 3.5% is why the planet works.
Chapter 3
The Warm Belt
Reefs live in a stripe around the middle of the planet. Ask why, and you end up talking about a tilt.
Chapter 4
Blue, Then Black
Take a red fish to 100 feet and it turns gray. Nothing happened to the fish.
Chapter 5
Building With a Dissolved Gas
The reef is made of air. Follow the carbon and you can watch it happen.
Chapter 6
The Coral’s Bargain
There is a second living thing inside every reef coral. It pays rent in sugar.
Chapter 7
When It Goes Wrong
White coral is not dead coral. It is coral that just lost its roommates.
Photos: Jiří Mikoláš, Vilnis Husko, Asad Photo Maldives, Jeffry Surianto, Жанна Алимкулова, Tom Fisk, mingche lee / Pexels
Play with it
Swim through a real reef in 3D
This is a 3D scan of a real coral reef, built from hundreds of underwater photos. Drag to look around and scroll to zoom. It works best full screen.
3D model: Underwater Coral Reef Photogrammetry 3D Scan by VIVID REALITY, on Sketchfab (CC BY 4.0).
How to use these pages
Watch it, read it, try it
Every chapter has the same rhythm: a video, three short cards, something live to explore, and a couple of hands-on activities. The last activity on each page is an eight-question practice set that covers the whole chapter. Do every one, retry anything you miss, and read the feedback. The wrap-up page ends with a twenty-question review of the entire reef.
Warm-up
What do you already know?
Six true-or-false guesses before you start. Getting some wrong right now is the point: each answer tells you which chapter explains it.
Ready?
Chapter 1 is fifteen minutes and mostly pictures
Photo credits (Pexels): Eclipse Chasers, Arias Bima.
Hop to:
← The Great Barrier Reef — place overview
All Places
- The Great Barrier Reef
- Monterey Bay
- The Galápagos
- The Ridge and the Trench — in development
- The Southern Ocean — in development
- The North Pacific Garbage Patch — in development