THE world's largest coral reef system, Australia's Great Barrier Reef, is only 600,000 years old, researchers have confirmed.
The biology of the reef has long fascinated scientists, but its age has remained a mystery. "We've tried every method of dating known to man, and it's proved very difficult to get reliable ages," says Colin Braithwaite of the University of Glasgow.
Now an international team of researchers has collected data from boreholes that reveals when the reef began growing on a sandy limestone base. The modern reef started growing just as a 100,000-year climate cycle kicked in that flips glacial periods into interglacials and back again. The cycle causes sea levels to rise and fall some 100 metres (
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