'Reefs of Hope'

According to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service, 2023 was the planet's hottest year on record and likely the warmest in the last 100,000 years, as reported by Reuters.
Red Sea corals are dubbed 'Super Corals' for their unexpected resilience to bleaching when exposed to high temperatures, either in nature or in scientific experiments. However, even here, the reefs struggled when the surface seawater temperatures in November 2023 were way above the annual average.
Scientists are trying to understand the biological capacity of these corals to live at higher temperatures.

In November 2023, the Transnational Red Sea Center at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne successfully carried out a new coral mission in the Djiboutian waters of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in close collaboration with two of its regional partners: the Université de Djibouti, the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherche de Djibouti (CERD) and the Red Sea University in Port Sudan.
The EPFL team of twelve researchers included six scientists from the Biological Geochemistry Laboratory (Prof Anders Meibom) and the Environmental Computational Science and Earth Observation Laboratory (Prof Devis Tuia).
The mission aimed to characterise the state of the reefs at the southern entrance to the Red Sea, their capacity to adapt to global warming, and their level of anthropogenic pollution in the Seven Brothers archipelago, a small chain of islands between Djibouti and Yemen.
The mission complemented the data collected in the Gulf of Tadjourah in September 2022 during the first expedition to Djibouti.
The mission took part in partnership with the Université de Djibouti, the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherche de Djibouti (CERD), the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development of Djibouti, and the Red Sea University in Port Sudan, and with the participation of six scientists from the Biological Geochemistry Laboratory (Prof Anders Meibom) and the Environmental Computational Science and Earth Observation Laboratory (Prof Devis Tuia) at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.