N. GBR - Blue (AU5R140)

Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation — Global Reef Expedition

Part of the regional summaries: Australia (GBR) - Far North: Blue stations (Habitat Protection Zone reefs) and Australia (GBR)

Country

Australia

Survey date(s)

2014-09-27

Coordinates

-11.8655, 143.8498

Coral cover

51%

Benthic transects+photo-quadrats

Observations

not yet tagged for this site

Heat stress

Today’s heat load

25.2°C 0.0°C-weeks

3 Oct 2026 · No heat stress

5-year thermal stress load

5-year mean max. degree heating weeks (DHW)

11.1°C-weeksⁱ

2021–2025

NOAA Coral Reef Watch — Far Northern GBR virtual station

i 5-year mean max. DHW is the mean of the annual maximum DHWs over the five complete years named above, not conditions today.

More info

Far Northern GBR (NOAA CRW virtual station)

Survey depth (expedition team)

6.3 m

Living Oceans Foundation (LOF) benthic survey depth; no dive by Anderson at this station

Sea surface temp. (satellite)

25.2°C

satellite sea surface temperature (SST) on the survey date (NOAA Coral Reef Watch, Far Northern GBR), not an in-water reading; it is the warmest-pixel (90th percentile) reading in the station area and can run 1–1.5°C above the reef

Four other CRD dive sites within 5 km shown in orange — click a marker to open its page.

🗺 Detailed map of the Global Reef Expedition dive sites, Five Reefs and unnamed reef 11-238, northern Great Barrier Reef (Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation; opens in a new window)

Site description

Setting

Global Reef Expedition station AU5R140, far northern Great Barrier Reef (-11.8655, 143.8498), surveyed on 27 September 2014.

Coral cover

Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
The in situ benthic transects recorded 51% live coral cover against a 41% algal fraction at a survey depth of 6.3 m.
That transect value is the authoritative cover figure for this site; no photographs exist.
Transect mean 65 ± 8.5% SE (n = 9 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is the expedition's station value (the headline weights each depth equally; one depth had a single transect).

Stressors

Regional context, not an observation here: this pre-dates the 2016 mass bleaching by about eighteen months; that event severely bleached hundreds of reefs on the northern Great Barrier Reef (Hughes et al. 2017), and the 5-year mean annual maximum thermal stress at the Far Northern GBR virtual station is 11.1 degree heating weeks.

Comparisons with other data

No prior survey data from this site. If you would like to share yours, please email us.

Data & links

Data are from the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation Global Reef Expedition and Coral Reef Diagnostics.