By Beth Daley,
The United Nations yesterday set aside $1 million to assess environmental damage caused by this week's devastating tsunami, as reports of destroyed coral reefs and uprooted mangrove forests began trickling in.
While attention is clearly focused on the rising human toll of the tragedy, some dive operators and marine biologists are reporting that from Sri Lanka to Thailand corals are suffocating under layers of mud, heaps of rotten fish, are clogging beachfronts, and rare turtle nesting sites have been washed out to sea.

"There is a huge natural cost, but what it is is still to be determined," said Lynne Hale, director of the global marine initiative for the Nature Conservancy, who worked in Thailand's Phuket Island and Sri Lanka for many years. Both areas were hard hit by the tsunami.
Now based in Rhode Island, Hale said the tsunami may have caused lasting environmental damage that may take decades or longer to recover from. "This is a massive, massive erosion event," she said.
A UN task force based in Geneva will assess two things: environmental damage that threatens human health, and the toll on the ecological resources -- many of which support tourism and the fishing industry.
The Indian Ocean region, with its aqua, shallow seas, hosts some of the most beloved and famous coral reefs in the world that support scores of fish species found nowhere else. Mangroves are critical nurseries for many of these fish. And the beaches of Sri Lanka, the Andaman and Nicobar islands, and other countries hit by the tsunami host prime nesting spots for some of the world's rarest sea turtles, such as leatherbacks that return to the same spot year after year to lay eggs.
Scientists yesterday said they expect marine life from shore to about a mile out to have suffered the worst damage. However, some biologists speculated that marine mammals such as whales and dolphins swimming near shore when the tsunami struck may have sensed the strange seas and headed for deeper waters, where the giant waves were barely noticeable. Land animals may have had the same "sixth sense" to move to safety: Wildlife officials in Sri Lanka's Yala National Park said they have not seen evidence that many animals died, despite the preserve's closeness to the ocean.
Scientists don't have comprehensive historical data about marine damage that tsunamis can cause, especially one of this magnitude. They do know that in 1883, when the Krakatoa volcano exploded and sent a giant tsunami washing over Indonesia, coral heads that weighed hundreds of tons were tossed hundreds of feet inland.
And in 1964, when a tsunami hit Alaska, news reports noted that baby salmon were killed, although it's unclear how many.
This week, dive operators and researchers began sending e-mails to the WorldFish Center in Malaysia, an international fisheries research center, painting an early bleak picture of the region's treasured coastal waters. On Phuket Island, one popular beach was piled with dead staghorn coral, starfish, gulper eels, sea cucumbers, and sea grasses.
In the Maldives, dive operator Norbert Schmidt said the eastern part of the island was hit the worst, with dead coral and sand covering the runway at Hulule International Airport. In Sri Lanka and Thailand, coral damage is reported to be severe, and trees have crashed down onto reefs, ripping many of the corals, some hundreds of years old, apart.
"Many fish washed ashore, trees that were knocked down [smashed] into the reefs," Michiru Main, a researcher who was conducting a reef survey at Mu Ko Surin, a popular dive spot in Thailand, when the tsunami struck, said in an e-mail. "I can definitely say there is damage in the area."
Already stressed from fishing and tourism, many of the reefs may be covered in mud, which can block sunlight that fish and other organisms below them need. Meanwhile, corals, which only grow a fraction of an inch each year, may be excreting mucus as a defensive mechanism against the mud -- "expensive in terms of energy [that] weakens the coral," e-mailed Marco Noordeloos of the WorldFish Center. Noordeloos said fish populations have probably been damaged, too, although it's far too early to get a complete picture.
Some scientists this week said human activity in the coastal zone contributed to the immense damage on shore -- such as building tourist hotels too close to the water and tearing out mangrove forests to put in shrimp aquaculture farms throughout Asia. But others say that while the lack of mangrove forests probably exacerbated the destruction, it's unlikely that they would have slowed the tsunami's enormous volume of water.
"Maybe in East Africa where the waves weren't as high, but I'm not sure when you get a 40-foot wave a mangrove would have made a huge difference," said Susi Moser, research scientist for the National Center for Atmospheric Research.