N. GBR - Pink (AU61A63)

Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation — Global Reef Expedition

Part of the regional summaries: Australia (GBR) - Far North: Pink stations (Preservation Zone reefs) and Australia (GBR)

Photo: Anderson Mayfield/Coral Reef Diagnostics

Country

Australia

Survey date(s)

2014-09-13

Coordinates

-13.3844, 143.9608

Coral cover

75%

Benthic transects+photo-quadrats

Observations

recent mortality

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)

Photographs

35 shown on this page

Site summary

A backreef slope on Unnamed Reef 61A, in an entry-restricted Preservation Zone, with a high 75% coral cover and a very large Pavona colony recorded in Anderson's notes. Shallow acroporids build stretches of near-100% cover, though there were scoured patches, storm-toppled colonies, and some dead Pocillopora, and an aggressive gray reef shark kept the divers company. Surveyed on the Living Oceans Foundation's Global Reef Expedition.

Max. depth dived

22.5 m

dive-log maximum

Sea surface temp. (satellite)

25.1°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

Bottom time

65 min

in at 10:59

One independent survey station shown with the program’s logo — click one to see how far it is from this site.

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, Jewell, Hilder, and Eyrie Reefs, northern Great Barrier Reef (Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation; opens in a new window)

1 of the 35 photographs on this page is shown beside the text that discusses them under "Site description" below.

Photo credit & attribution

Site description

Setting

This backreef slope on Unnamed Reef 61A drops steadily to about 20-23 m before plunging to a sandy floor at 30 m. Visibility was murky (3-4 m), but pockets of the reef were genuinely spectacular — including a very large Pavona colony in Anderson's notes (on his 15 m transect), its base carpeted in 95% live cover with fire coral wedged into its crevices. Entry to this Preservation Zone reef is restricted under the strictest tier of Great Barrier Reef Marine Park protection.

General benthic features

Elsewhere the picture was more mixed: some patches held scoured, low-cover hard bottom, while shallow bottlebrush, and fast-growing acroporids built stretches of near-100% cover (e.g., Image 2).

Coral cover

Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
The expedition's in situ point-count transects at this station recorded 75% live coral cover against 12% total algal cover.
Transect mean 76 ± 4.0% SE (n = 6 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

A handful of storm-toppled colonies sat above 5 m, not yet overgrown by algae or cyanobacteria, and on his 14.5 m transect Anderson recorded dead Pocillopora damicornis and P. verrucosa amid abundant soft corals and massive poritids. No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores evident.

Fish and other fauna

An aggressive gray reef shark kept the divers company throughout.

Comparisons with other data

No other surveys have been conducted at this site to date. Within 5 km, one independent station, AIMS manta tow at SAND BANK NO 8 REEF, 2.91 km away, read 19–43% between 1993 and 2023.

Independent surveys nearby

Within 5 km, 1 independent survey station recorded hard coral cover in 6 surveys between 1993 and 2023. The one station surveyed in more than one year increased by 8.5 points between its first and latest surveys. The longest record, SAND BANK NO 8 REEF (AIMS manta tow, 2.91 km away), went from 35% in 1993 to 43% in 2023. Since 2021, station-year means average 34% (range 25–43%; n = 2 station-years from 2 surveys). This site's own estimate (75%) is not compared with these surveys: none lies within 2 km.

Collected by other programs using different methods (AIMS manta tow is a towed visual estimate in categorical bins), so these are context for the figures above, not a like-for-like comparison. Where a station was surveyed more than once, the cell shows either the range of its values or, as a single value, the mean of surveys made in one year. Station names are not dive-site names.

Independent survey data near this site
Agency	Site / location	Date	Hard coral cover (%)	Distance	Link
AIMS manta tow	SAND BANK NO 8 REEF	1993–2023	19–43% (6 surveys)	2.91 km	doi:10.25845/5c09b0abf315a

Data & links

All images from Coral Reef Diagnostics. Data are from the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation Global Reef Expedition, Coral Reef Diagnostics, and the organizations named in the data sources above.