ニューヨーク・タイムズさんのインスタグラム写真 - (ニューヨーク・タイムズInstagram)「Already contending with climate change, the tourism operators who depend on the Great Barrier Reef have been walloped by the pandemic.⁣ ⁣ Under the ocean, among the parrotfish and green turtles, Russell Hosp, a local reef guide, said, “you could almost forget what was going on in the world.” But aboard the boat, the harsh reality of the virus’s impact came flooding back.⁣ ⁣ “It was a bit surreal,” Hosp said of spending hours at sea unaccompanied by the usual enthusiastic visitors. In that moment, he said, he realized just how much the coronavirus “had changed the world.”⁣ ⁣ The pandemic has fast-forwarded a looming reckoning for Cairns, a city of 150,000 people in far northeastern Australia that is the main gateway to the reef and the base for Hosp and many others whose livelihoods depend on it.⁣ ⁣ Tour operators were already fighting a perception that the reef is in its death throes, as warming waters cause repeated mass bleaching that has robbed some corals of their vivid colors. But where climate change has in reality been more of a creeping threat to the reef’s survival and thus to Cairns’s tourism lifeblood, the coronavirus has delivered a hammer blow.⁣ ⁣ Foreign and local tourists, already deterred by last summer’s devastating bush fires and now locked out by Australia’s travel bans, have all but vanished, grinding a $4.6 billion industry built around the world’s largest living structure to a near halt.⁣ ⁣ “We’d never stopped running before — the global financial crisis, terrorism attacks, airline strikes; you name it, the world has thrown it at us,” Hosp said. “We don’t know if we’ll ever get back to normal.”⁣ ⁣ Tap the link in our bio to read the latest dispatch from the Great Barrier Reef. Photos by @nataliegrono.⁣」8月23日 9時19分