Sophie Kalkowski-Pope has been diving the Great Barrier Reef since she was a little girl, but her first dive since Tropical Cyclone Jasper dumped metres of rain resulted in tears.
The young Queenslander and her family were devastated to discover bleaching on previously vibrant reefs and algae-covered corals during a dive near the Frankland Islands south of Cairns.
"I held my mum in the water while she cried into her mask, looking out at what we were seeing, which was effectively just dead coral for hundreds of metres," Ms Kalkowski-Pope said.
"What we saw out there was really quite confronting."
In December, the slow-moving cyclone dumped enough rain for some parts of Far North Queensland to record their worst floods in more than 110 years.
Falls of more than 2 metres were recorded near Cairns, while further north at the World Heritage Daintree Rainforest, rainfall totals were higher.
Scientist and conservationist Nigel Brothers has been calculating the environmental damage along a 10-kilometre stretch of shoreline where the rainforest meets the reef.
He said a "conservative estimate" suggested 10,000 fish — from about 30 species — had died.
"They included wonderful well-known fish species like coral trout, eels and mantis shrimps." Mr Brothers said.
He said the drenching had resulted in the deaths of other animals, including echidnas and wallabies, as they were washed from the rainforest onto the beach.
Freshwater floods into reef
The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) acting chief scientist, Jessica Stella, said the freshwater run-off after the record rainfall exacerbated the risk to already fragile coral.
Dr Stella said the summer began with elevated sea surface temperatures, which stressed the coral, and while cyclones could reduce reef temperatures, the volume of rain only added to the stress.
She said heavy rainfall associated with the severe storms could carry sediments and nutrients from farm run-off to inshore reefs and beyond.
Dr Stella said the freshwater run-off sat on the surface, above seawater, and could affect "anything in its path", stressing coral to death and suffocating fish.
While coral can recover from bleaching, she said they could die completely if the effects of the freshwater run-off were too strong, with shallow and inshore reefs the most vulnerable.
Ms Kalkowski-Pope said the bleaching she and her family saw was confined to the shallower depths, while an outer reef they visited was in a much better condition.
"The good thing is the reef isn't all dead," she said.
"Below that 3-metre mark, we're still seeing a relatively intact ecosystem, with some bleaching, but the area tourists come to snorkel in is probably that 1 to 5-metre range, and [closer to the surface is] where a lot of this mortality has happened."
Record-breaking deluges destabilise land
Further north, the almost week-long deluge broke multiple records, including a 13.3-metre peak in the Annan River on December 18, according to Christina Howley from Cape York Water Partnership.
"The previous maximum ever recorded was 10.4 metres," she said.
"There was so much force and so much water in the systems that they just ploughed through entire hills and fields."
Ms Howley said landslides and destruction of vegetation on riverbanks destroyed habitats and pushed huge amounts of sediment into catchments.
She said turbidity levels the group recorded at the mouth of the Annan River were three times higher than they'd ever measured in a flood event.
"We could see in some satellite images dirty or green water all the way from the Daintree up past Lizard Island, and, really, almost all the way up the coast."
Daintree ecotourism business director Neil Hewett, who has lived at Cooper Creek for three and a half decades, said he'd observed the rainforest becoming structurally weaker in recent years.
He said monsoonal rains used to be predictable mid-November events that "played out like a reset for the machinery of life".
"But they've been becoming less predictable, more infrequent," he said.
Mr Hewett said it was possible tens of thousands of feral pigs estimated to live in the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area had contributed to the extent of the landslides.
"It's very difficult to apportion pig damage to the scope of structural weakness, but I think it would be foolish to say they didn't contribute at all," he said.
Changing climate compounding effects
GBRMPA's Dr Stella said the frequency, timing and intensity of cyclones were changing, while a warming climate could make the storms more destructive.
"What we've seen from climate change is an increase in heavy rainfall [and] slowing down of cyclones, so they tend to sit in one spot and dump a lot of rainfall and in smaller areas," Dr Stella said.
"As managers of the Marine Park, a deep concern of ours is how frequently these disturbances are happening and how well the communities are able to recover in between."