The Great Barrier Reef is a master at cheating death. It has resurrected itself five times in the last 30,000 years after being wiped out by dramatic environmental shifts.

Jody Webster at the University of Sydney and his colleagues studied samples collected from today’s reef. They collected 30- to 40-metre-long cores taken from 16 different sites, which revealed how the reef has changed over the last 30 millennia.

The researchers found evidence of five mass reef deaths triggered by sudden changes in …