It turns out that remote coral reefs can thrive despite threats posed by climate change. This is great news for advocates for coral reef preservation since a decade-long study found that those surrounding remote islands were dramatically healthier than those in populated areas subject to a variety of human impacts, including overfishing and coastal development. Study leader Jennifer Smith of the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography led the study.

"Coral reefs are home to more species than any other marine ecosystem on the planet. And they’re characteristically different than most ecosystems on the planet because they are dominated by animals, these corals that grow on the bottom. And so in a healthy coral reef, you have a landscape that is dominated by these beautiful reef building corals that are really the ecosystem engineers - that provides food and shelter for all the other organisms that live in that ecosystem."

Their new study shows that preservation efforts can buy researchers time as they figure out how to deal with the threat posed by ocean warming.