TAIPEI: US climber Alex Honnold scaled the Taipei 101 skyscraper without ropes or safety netting on Sunday, watched by thousands of cheering and waving fans as he clambered up one of the world’s tallest buildings.
“Sick,” Honnold said as he got to the top spire of Taiwan’s tallest building after his 91-minute “free solo” ascent, which was organized and broadcast live by Netflix.
“What a beautiful way to see Taipei,” he told reporters after his mission, which was postponed by a day due to wet weather.
The 508-meter (1,667-foot) Taipei 101, which dominates the city’s skyline and is a major tourist attraction, was the tallest building in the world from 2004 to 2010, a crown currently held by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
The climb, with no safety equipment, took place with the full support and permission of Taipei 101 and the city government.
Honnold said he had once thought of climbing the structure without permission.
“But then out of respect for the building and respect for all the people on the team who’d allowed me access to look at it, I was like, well obviously I’m not going to poach this, I’m going to respect the people and just see if it ever comes together.”
Executive Producer James Smith said it was rare for a building to trust a climber and allow such an event to take place, calling Taipei 101 “a real icon of this country.”
Taiwanese politicians took to social media to thank Honnold and Netflix for putting Taiwan — more accustomed to featuring in global headlines for its semiconductor prowess or Chinese military threats — in the international spotlight with such a different perspective.
“Congratulations to the brave, fearless Alex for completing the challenge,” President Lai Ching-te wrote on his Facebook page.
“Through Netflix’s live broadcast cameras, the world didn’t just see Taipei 101 — it also saw the warmth and passion of the Taiwanese people, and the beautiful hills and scenery of this land,” he added.
This is not the first time Taipei 101 has been scaled.
In 2004, French climber Alain Robert, dubbed “Spiderman” for his ropeless ascents of some of the world’s highest skyscrapers, climbed the building, though did so with a safety rope in a time of four hours.
US climber scales Taiwan’s tallest building Taipei 101 without ropes
https://arab.news/mp9pe
US climber scales Taiwan’s tallest building Taipei 101 without ropes
- ‘Free solo’ ascent organized and shown live by Netflix
- Taipei 101 was once tallest building in the world
Three-year heatwave bleached half the planet’s coral reefs: study
PARIS: A study published on Tuesday showed that more than half of the world’s coral reefs were bleached between 2014-2017 — a record-setting episode now being eclipsed by another series of devastating heatwaves.
The analysis concluded that 51 percent of the world’s reefs endured moderate or worse bleaching while 15 percent experienced significant mortality over the three-year period known as the “Third Global Bleaching Event.”
It was “by far the most severe and widespread coral bleaching event on record,” said Sean Connolly, one the study’s authors and a senior scientist at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
“And yet, reefs are currently experiencing an even more severe Fourth Event, which started in early 2023,” Connolly said in a statement.
When the sea overheats, corals eject the microscopic algae that provides their distinct color and food source.
Unless ocean temperatures return to more tolerable levels, bleached corals are unable to recover and eventually die of starvation.
“Our findings demonstrate that the impacts of ocean warming on coral reefs are accelerating, with the near certainty that ongoing warming will cause large-scale, possibly irreversible, degradation of these essential ecosystems,” said the study in the journal Nature Communications.
An international team of scientists analyzed data from more than 15,000 in-water and aerial surveys of reefs around the world over the 2014-2017 period.
They combined the data with satellite-based heat stress measurements and used statistical models to estimate how much bleaching occurred around the world.
No time to recover
The two previous global bleaching events, in 1998 and 2010, had lasted one year.
“2014-17 was the first record of a global coral bleaching event lasting much beyond a single year,” the study said.
“Ocean warming is increasing the frequency, extent, and severity of tropical-coral bleaching and mortality.”
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, for instance, saw peak heat stress increase each year between 2014 and 2017.
“We are seeing that reefs don’t have time to recover properly before the next bleaching event occurs,” said Scott Heron, professor of physics at James Cook University in Australia.
A major scientific report last year warned that the world’s tropical coral reefs have likely reached a “tipping point” — a shift that could trigger massive and often permanent changes in the natural world.
The global scientific consensus is that most coral reefs would perish at warming of 1.5C above preindustrial levels — the ambitious, long-term limit countries agreed to pursue under the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Global temperatures exceeded 1.5C on average between 2023-2025, the European Union’s climate monitoring service, Copernicus, said last month.
“We are only just beginning to analyze bleaching and mortality observations from the current bleaching event,” Connolly told AFP.
“However the overall level of heat stress was extraordinarily high, especially in 2023-2024, comparable to or higher than what was observed in 2014-2017, at least in some regions,” he said.
He said the Pacific coastline of Panama experienced “dramatically worse heat stress than they had ever experienced before, and we observed considerable coral mortality.”
