April 13, 2007 — A 2005 earthquake off the coast of Indonesia raised an island nearly four feet out of the water, causing one of the biggest coral die-offs recorded, scientists said Friday.
Researchers who surveyed the island of Simeulue in recent weeks found that the March 2005 quake had exposed most of the coral along its 190-mile-long coast.
"The scale of it was quite extraordinary," said Andrew Baird, who took part in the survey with scientists from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society. "Exposed corals were everywhere."
At some points along the coast, coral was visible from a few feet from the shore to a third of a mile out to sea. Coral reefs host many species of marine life.
"Some species suffered up to 100 percent loss at some sites," said Baird, of the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Coral Reef.
More than 900 people were killed and tens of thousands left homeless by the 8.7-magnitude earthquake, which also struck two other islands off Sumatra — Nias and Banyak. The quake came three months after the 2004 tsunami that left 230,000 people in a dozen Indian Ocean countries dead or missing.
Australian reef expert Clive Wilkinson, who did not take part in the survey, said the damage to the Simeuleu reefs was to be expected, given the uplift that occurred and the severity of the quake.
"This has been going on for million of years," Wilkinson said. "It's part of natural reef evolution. There are many islands in the Pacific that are actually uplifted coral reefs. It's just what happens to reefs."
