In September-October of 2014, the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation surveyed the northernmost reefs of Australia's Great Barrier Reef (from -15 to -11 degrees of latitude). In contrast to prior cruises, I did not collect samples and only collected reef structure data (rugosity, bommie cover, etc.). For the field report, please click here and for GPS coordinates of the ~170 reefs surveyed, see this document. I believe this is the most time I ever spent underwater in a month= 85 hrs! Unfortunately, this may very well be the last ever survey of the northern GBR when coral was still relatively healthy, as repeated bleaching events have occurred essentially annually since then.

Here are my field notes.

Here are two blogs I wrote during the trip: one on rugosity and another on coral health.

Here are my rugosity data.

Here are some of the best pics. If you want to check out all 10,000 of them, check out these monster Aperture files (hosted on my OneDrive account): file 1 file 2. I will slowly but surely extract them from the Aperture files and post them on a site-by-site basis, as I have done for other research missions. I also have the “best of” on my Adobe Portfolio.