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+0.22 per minute · since 00:00 UTC
This is a live, continuously changing estimate. It isn't printed here because a figure on paper would be wrong the moment you read it — see the current value at https://earthnow.app/signal/coral-reef-lost-today.
Estimated, not measured
By NOAA's count, reefs cover less than one per cent of the ocean floor and support about a quarter of all marine life. They are also the ecosystem most sensitive to the heat the ocean is absorbing.
Estimated hectares of coral reef lost since midnight UTC to bleaching, acidification, disease and physical damage.
Nobody counts this as it happens. EarthNow takes a published figure for the whole day, divides it by the 86,400 seconds in a day, and multiplies by the seconds elapsed since midnight UTC. So the value climbs smoothly and is the right order of magnitude — but the smoothness is arithmetic, not observation. Nothing happening in the world is being watched in real time.
value = daily total ÷ 86,400 × seconds since 00:00 UTC
A consequence worth knowing: the counter resets at midnight UTC, not at your midnight. And because the figure advances at a constant rate, this page cannot tell you whether today is unusual. For that you need a measurement.
11,700 km² of living coral lost over 2009–2018 — 14% of the world's coral — averaged per year. GCRMN's 2025 report reframes to share of cover (30.2% to 27.3%) and states no reef area, so this decade average cannot be refreshed in hectares from it.
The figure is theirs; the running total is ours. Cite them for the number, and EarthNow for what it looks like as it accumulates.
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