Your sunscreen is killing coral reefs
The importance of using sunscreen to protect against the harmful effects of the sun’s UV rays is well-known. However, you may want to find some alternatives for it this summer, as many sunscreens pose a threat to the ocean environment, according to this study.
Most sunscreens, especially the spray-on types, contain oxybenzone, which harms coral and is in high concentrations at some of the world’s most popular coral reefs. The chemical has been found to poison coral in several ways: it bleaches them, disrupts reproduction and growth, leaving young corals forever deformed, trapped in their skeletons and unable to float away to create new colonies, as the MNN reports.
It doesn’t take much oxybenzone to produce harm. Even a single drop in a volume of water larger than 6.5 Olympic-sized swimming pools is potent enough to cause plenty of damage, according to the Washington Post.
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“The use of oxybenzone-containing products needs to be seriously deliberated in islands and areas where coral reef conservation is a critical issue,” team leader Craig Downs of the Haereticus Environmental Laboratory in Virginia told Phys.org. “We have lost at least 80 percent of the coral reefs in the Caribbean. Any small effort to reduce oxybenzone pollution could mean that a coral reef survives a long, hot summer, or that a degraded area recovers.”
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