Oil pollution and Red Sea tourism lead the list

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Earthwatch

Red Sea Rangers: Volunteers of the Reef Check Israel Team strike a pose after surveying Gulf of Aqaba corals in Reef Check '97. Photo: Reef Check

Shared by Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, the Gulf of Aqaba is the northernmost reach of coral reefs in the region, and it's under increasing pressure from tourism. Israel's resorts and port facilities at Eilat are polluting reefs there, and large-scale tourism in the area is expected to quadruple by the year 2000.

In December 1997 the U.S. granted $2 million to help Jordan and Israel build a coral reef "peace park" in the Gulf of Aqaba as part of the Middle East peace accord. But even protected areas aren't always safe from human error: In April 1998 an Israeli excursion boat blundered into a particularly pristine reef in the Eilat Coral Reserve, apparently because it had broken away from its tie-up. "It is a disaster," Noam Meshi, the coral reserve's manager, told the Jerusalem Post. "The damage is huge and it will take possibly more than a century for the coral to reach the state it was before."