The problem isn’t necessarily that they won’t move to colder areas (well that is a problem for coastal regions susceptible to hurricanes, etc, but I digress). T

The problem isn’t necessarily that they won’t move to colder areas (well that is a problem for coastal regions susceptible to hurricanes, etc, but I digress). The problem is that the waters around those reefs are warming up faster than the reefs could ever possibly hope to move. Reefs are built by corals excreting calcium carbonate onto their attached surface. This process is an incredibly slow one with mature reefs taking many hundreds of thousands of years to form. The reefs can’t keep ahead of water temperatures that are projected to change within the next 50 years.