Hurricane Beryl and other superstorms would be much more dangerous without these iconic ocean animals.
Hurricane season has begun, and it’s off to a frightening start.
On Wednesday morning, Beryl — a Category 4 storm and the first named hurricane of the year — was churning toward Jamaica, where it’s expected to make landfall later today and bring life-threatening wind and flooding. Earlier in the week, Beryl pummeled islands in the southeast Caribbean, including Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. It flattened buildings, wiped out electricity, and left at least four people dead. Heavy rainfall from the storm has also killed another three people in Venezuela.
Hurricane Beryl is already record-breaking. On Tuesday, Beryl intensified into a Category 5 storm, before slowing back down Wednesday, making it the earliest Category 5 storm on record in the Atlantic. The storm, which is expected to reach the Cayman Islands by Thursday, also intensified at record speeds for a storm this early in the year, jumping from Category 1 to Category 4 in less than 24 hours.
Caribbean nations are particularly vulnerable to hurricanes, for the obvious reason that they’re often in the path of these storms. Hurricanes typically form in the Atlantic Ocean, west of northern Africa, and then travel west toward the Caribbean and Southeastern US.
But Caribbean islands also have one of the world’s best defense systems against superstorms like Beryl. That system is hidden under the waves, it’s free, and it’s all-natural. It’s coral reefs.
Indeed, most Caribbean nations are surrounded by a colorful patchwork of coral reefs, communities of living animals that function together as natural seawalls. These hard, rocklike creatures help dampen waves and reduce flooding. Research shows that coral reefs help dozens of countries avert billions of dollars in flood damage each year, in the Caribbean and globally.
The problem, more pressing now than ever, is that these lifesaving ecosystems are vanishing — for the very same reason hurricanes are becoming more destructive.
