Scientists were not happy when news broke that the world's largest coral reef system was dead. Dead and dying were two different things, and it turns out that the article published by Outside Magazine provided inaccurate information.

Outside Magazine published an obituary of the Great Barrier Reef. The chief of the Coral Reef Ecosystem Program at the NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Center, Russel Brainard, spoke out after the article went viral online, pointing out its inaccuracy. Although he told the Huffington Post that he assumed that the article was meant to highlight the urgency of the situation, he noted that people who do not know better might take the article at face value.

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The obituary, written by Rowan Jacobsen, provided a detailed history of how the Great Barrier Reef was formed before he proclaimed it as currently dead. He blamed on the Australian government for not protecting the reef.

The scientific community was upset with Jacobsen's overstatements about the state of the Great Barrier Reef because instead of pointing out what is needed to address the crisis, it might just do the contrary and let people lose hope. According to scientists, a global crisis should be faced with optimism and misleading articles might do more harm.

Brainard stressed that the Great Barrier Reef was in a dire situation. According to the preliminary results of a survey conducted between March and June of this year, 22 percent of the Great Barrier Reef died due to a 2016 bleaching event.

However, the Australian government launched a Reef 2050 Plan in 2015 which includes strategies for refining water quality to help corals recover from bleaching. Brainard said that more than half of the Great Barrier Reef is still alive and that "these natural systems do have some ability to be resilient and bounce back," he added.