Hughes said earlier this year that two-thirds of corals in the Great Barrier Reef's northern section had died in back-to-back bleaching events in 2016 and 2017.
At 1,400 miles long, the Great Barrier Reef is by far the largest in the world, but half of its coral has died in the past two years after unprecedented back-to-back bleaching events.
Eakin said many scientist had predicted two or three-year-long events would not begin occurring until the 2020s: "Yet here we are now with back-to-back to sometimes-back-again bleaching".
Aerial surveys by James Cook University professor Terry Hughes have shown back-to-back mass bleaching events have decimated the northern reef.
The report in the journal Nature Climate Change analyzed how corals along the Great Barrier fared in back-to-back mass bleaching events.
But now, with back-to-back mass bleaching events in 2016 and 2017 causing large swathes of the Great Barrier Reef's corals to die, some members of the Reef 2050 advisory committee, a group of scientists and experts tasked with implementing the government's plan, have raised doubts about its feasibility.
Though Gates certainly hadn't planned on back-to-back bleaching episodes when she proposed the super-coral project, in a perverse sort of way they turned out to be godsends.
Spurred by record-breaking temperatures, some 900 miles of coral was hit with back-to-back bleaching, particularly affecting the middle third of the structure that stretches along Australia's northeastern coast.
When it did make a return, it came back treated, bleached and torn (as evinced by the current ripped jeans revival) but for spring/summer 2015, many designers have given denim a new story.
And comprehending why corals bounce back, or resist bleaching in the first place, could help preserve whole corals species and create a legacy for the future.
The street looks more like a rambling California beach town, circa 1970, laid-back, unstudied, bleached into a certain grayness by the salt air.
