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A Desperate Push to Save Florida's Coral: Get It Out of the Sea
佛罗里达珊瑚的绝地抢救：把珊瑚捞出海洋
When Bailey Thomasson first spotted the coral, she felt a jolt of relief.
当贝利·托马森一开始看到珊瑚时，她感到一阵释然。
She was diving for samples off the Florida Keys, and the thicket of elkhorn coral below looked brown, not the stark white that would indicate bleaching from the record-breaking sea temperatures in the area.
她正在佛罗里达礁岛群潜水采集样本，下面的一丛麋角珊瑚看起来是棕色而非惨白的颜色，白色表明该地区破纪录的海洋温度导致了珊瑚白化。
But as she swam closer, she realized the situation was far worse than she'd considered possible. "The coral didn't even have a chance to bleach, it just died," said Ms. Thomasson, who works for the Coral Restoration Foundation, a nonprofit group based in the Keys.
但等她游得更近了一些，她意识到情况比她想象的要糟糕许多。"珊瑚甚至还没来得及白化，就已经死了。"托马森说，她在珊瑚复育基金会工作，这是一个位于礁岛群的非营利性组织。
The brown color was not healthy coral but dead tissue sloughing off the skeleton, almost as if it had melted. "It just felt like, ‘Oh my God, we're in the apocalypse,'" she said. "What's happening?"
棕色的东西不是健康的珊瑚，而是从珊瑚骨骼上脱落的死亡组织，这些组织就像融化了一样。"当时就感觉，‘哦，天哪，末日来了'，"她说，"到底发生了什么？"
With climate change ravaging Florida's beloved reef, people who've devoted their careers to restoring the coral in the sea are now racing to get it out of the water, to tanks on land.
随着气候变化蹂躏着佛罗里达州人们所珍爱的珊瑚礁，一些以恢复海洋中的珊瑚为事业的人们正在迅速地将珊瑚从水中救出，并转移到陆地的水箱里。
They're pushing through feelings of grief and fear over the future to save what genetic material and young corals they can. But in the background, an existential question looms: How can they restore reefs if the ocean is getting too hot for coral to live there?
他们强忍着悲痛情绪和对未来的恐惧，尽其所能地拯救珊瑚的遗传物质和幼年珊瑚。但在这背后，一个事关存亡的问题隐约浮现：如果海洋变得太热，让珊瑚无法生存，那么他们怎么能恢复珊瑚礁呢？
While marine heat waves occur naturally, the eye-popping sea temperatures recorded off the Keys this month (one reading hit 101 degrees Fahrenheit, or just over 38 Celsius) have been made worse by global warming, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
虽然海洋热浪是自然发生的，但根据美国国家海洋和大气管理局的数据，本月在礁岛群附近记录到的令人瞠目结舌的海洋温度(其中一个读数高达101华氏度，即略高于38摄氏度)因全球变暖而变得更加严重。
The world's oceans have absorbed 90 percent of the additional heat unleashed by people burning fossil fuels and razing forests. Currently, about 44 percent of the global ocean is in a heat wave.
全世界的海洋吸收了90%的额外热量，这些热量因人类燃烧化石燃料和砍伐森林而产生。目前，全球约44%的海洋处于热浪之中。
The mass coral bleaching happening throughout the Keys is the most severe in the state's history, Derek Manzello, the coordinator of NOAA's Coral Reef Watch program, said. Surveys over the next few months are needed to understand how much coral has died. "I fear for the worst," he said.
美国国家海洋和大气管理局珊瑚礁观察项目的协调员德里克·曼泽洛说，整个礁岛群发生的大规模珊瑚白化是佛罗里达州历史上最严重的一次。需要在接下来的几个月里进行调查，以了解珊瑚死亡数量。"我担心会出现最坏的情况。"他说。
Ms.Thomasson and her colleagues discovered that day, July 20, that all the coral at their acre-wide restoration plot at Sombrero Reef, about five nautical miles south of Marathon, Florida, was dead or so severely bleached that it was almost certain to die.
托马森和她的同事们在7月20日那天发现，在佛罗里达州马拉松以南约5海里的宽边帽礁岛，面积达数英亩的复育场的所有珊瑚都已经死亡，或严重白化而几近死亡。
The next day, she set out with her team to check on their Looe Key coral nursery, a site that they'd carefully built over the last two years off Big Pine Key. In May, they'd met a goal of installing 100 coral-nursery structures there.
第二天，她和她的团队出发去检查位于卢礁岛的复育场，这是他们在过去两年里在大松礁岛附近精心建造的一个场地。今年5月，他们实现了在那里安装100个珊瑚复育设施的目标。
Now, as they approached by boat, they could see the white of the bleached coral below. The team embraced in a group hug before jumping in. When they resurfaced, Ms. Thomasson called her boss, crying so hard that at first he couldn't understand her.
如今，当他们乘船靠近时，他们可以看到水下的珊瑚已白化。队员们拥抱在一起，然后才跳入水中。当他们重新浮出水面，托马森给她的老板打了个电话，她哭得很厉害，以至于老板一开始没听懂她在说什么。
"Everything at Looe Key is lost," she told him, some 5,400 pieces of elkhorn and staghorn coral.
"卢礁岛的所有珊瑚都没了。"她告诉老板，共有大约5400块麋角珊瑚和鹿角珊瑚。
