Reefs Quotes

“Land forests are the coral reefs of the ocean of air.”
― Steven Magee

“I watched the enormity of the clouds for several minutes. What I wanted to experience in the water, I realized, was how life of the reef was layered and intertwined. I now had many individual pieces at hand: named images, nouns. How were they related? What were the verbs? Which syntaxes were indigenous to the place? I asked a dozen knowledgeable people. No one was inclined to elaborate- or they didn’t know. “Did you see the octopus?” Someone shouted after the dive. Yes, I thought, but who among us knows what it was doing? What else was THERE, just then? WHY?”
― Barry Lopez, About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory

“The Great Barrier Reef is so extensive that no human mind can take it in, the exception perhaps being astronauts who've seen its full length from outer space. Gigantism pervades its statistics. Roughly half the size of Texas, it encloses some 215,000 square miles of coastland, sea, and coral. It extends for about 1,430 miles along Australia's east coast, and encompasses around three thousand individual reefs and a thousand islands. So vast is it, in fact, that it's only since the 1970s, with the establishment of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, that a size has been more or less agreed upon. Prior to that, explorers and navigators gave varying figures for its length.”
― Iain McCalman, The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change

“There are many corals that are not algae-assisted, but all reef-growing corals are. They need the extra energy generated by the algae's oxygen and sugars to grow fast enough to combat all the forces that work toward reef destruction.”
― Iain McCalman, The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change

“Reefs, [Charlie Vernon] points out, are nature's archives and historians. They are complex data banks that record evidence of environmental changes from millions of years ago up to the present.”
― Iain McCalman, The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change