Source: The National

"The waters of the Gulf are hot - up to 35°C in summer. If the sea off Australia was that warm, the entire Great Barrier Reef would die.

So how do the corals and reef fish in Abu Dhabi's coastal waters survive?

In geological terms, the emirate's modern coastline is extremely young - just 4,000 years old, according to Prof John Burt, a marine biologist at New York University Abu Dhabi.

In that time, somehow its corals have managed to beat the heat. The question is whether that has been a slow process, creating a stable local stock of heat-resistant corals, or whether each generation in turn finds its own way of coping."

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