This is Scientific American 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher Antaljata.

Within a few decades, global temperatures are expected to climb to 1.5 degrees Celsius

above pre-industrial levels. And that's going to be really bad for corals, according to

the latest report out from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

So the recent IPCC report says that up to 1.5, we can expect 10 to 30% coral survivorship

and above that, it decreases precipitously.

Andrea Gratoli is a distinguished professor at the Ohio State University.

Amid the doom and gloom of the IPCC report, Gratoli has some rare good news. Corals may

be more adaptable to future conditions than we thought.

Her team studied three species of coral from the island of Oahu, in Hawaii. They put them

in tanks with either heat stress, more acidic water, or both.

And what really matters in this study is the one worth both increases in temperature

and ocean acidification, because that's exactly what's happening on reefs now.

22 months later, they assessed the winners and losers, and they found that on average,

more than half the corals survived. Even after being punished with those warmer,

more acidic waters, the kind they'd face under two degrees of global warming.

The corals that survived two of the three species were actually physiologically

performing normally. They were doing more than surviving, right? They were coping,

they'd acclimatized, they were doing well.

The results appear in the journal Scientific Reports. Gratoli says the study provides hope

the world's corals may be more resilient than we thought, especially since one of the Hawaiian

species they studied is widespread around the planet. But will this good news motivate world leaders

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