America's Deepest Coral Reef

It is with mixed emotions that I sit on my fly-bridge anchored in the Dry Tortugas National Park, Florida, writing these thoughts. It is early June, 2006, nearly a year after I descended 230 feet below the surface of the ocean to be amongst the first to physically touch bottom and photograph the world's deepest coral reef - Pulley Ridge, the healthiest reef I have seen in my lifetime. On this beautiful summer day a year later, I am hosting my sixth major coral research project in a year and a half,, with a group of National Park Service coral biologists who are revisiting a shallow reef which they have been studying since 1997. They are conducting a monitoring program designed to track the health of this coral reef system, one of the few Florida reefs still more alive than dead. In stark contrast to Pulley Ridge the NPS project sadly is the documentation of a reef in decline as most of our shallow water reefs are these days...