Since 2014, a mass of unusually warm water has hovered and swelled in the Pacific Ocean off the West Coast of North America, playing havoc with marine wildlife, water quality and the regional weather.
Earlier this year, weather and oceanography experts thought it was waning. But no: The Blob came back, and it is again in position off the coast, threatening to smother normal coastal weather and ecosystem behavior.
The Blob isn’t exactly to blame for California’s drought, though it certainly aggravated the problem. But it is to blame for seriously disrupting the ocean food chain and for creating conditions that fed unprecedented algal blooms in the coastal Pacific.
With the Blob back in play again, what does it mean for the winter ahead? To find out, Water Deeply spoke with Nicholas Bond, a research meteorologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and Washington’s state climatologist. In June 2014, Bond named this persistent weather phenomenon, and later wrote the first scientific paper characterizing it.
Water Deeply: What exactly is the Blob?
Washington’s state climatologist Nicholas Bond named the warm ocean mass now commonly known as “the Blob.” (Nicholas Bond)
Nicholas Bond: It’s a large mass of water in the northeast Pacific Ocean that’s considerably warmer than usual. It doesn’t have any real sharply defined boundaries, but it’s an area that, at times, has stretched from Baja California up to the Bering Sea. At other times, it’s kinda shrunk back down. It’s been at least 1,000 miles (1,600km) across and, recently, quite deep.
Typically, it’s been something like2.7–3.6F (1.5–2C) warmer than normal. But there have been places where it’s been as much as 9F (5C) warmer. It’s waxed and waned, but it’s been that way since early 2014. The warmer-than-normal water extends down to something like 300m (1,000ft) below the surface. So that’s a huge volume of considerably warmer-than-normal water.
Water Deeply: Is it still out there?
Bond: Yeah. There was sort of a reinvigoration this past summer. The temperatures were moderating early in 2016, and then, at least in a large area south of Alaska and off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, it really warmed up again this past summer.
Water Deeply: What causes it?
Bond: A lot of it, almost all of it, is due to just the unusual weather patterns that have been occurring over the northeast Pacific during the past few years. They haven’t been the same patterns, but what really got it started was when a ridge of higher-than-normal sea-level pressure set up during the winter of 2013–14 over the northeast Pacific.
That was a very persistent and strong ridge of higher-than-normal pressure that kind of blocked the usual parade of storms across the Pacific. That meant less heat was drawn out of the ocean into the atmosphere than usual. It meant there was less cold water (from the deeper ocean) mixing near the surface part of the ocean. And also the unusual winds meant the upper-level currents in the ocean were a little bit different from usual.
Water Deeply: Is it unprecedented?
Bond: Yeah, certainly. In terms of the magnitude of anomalies in a lot of locations, we haven’t seen anything quite like this. I did a fairly careful study using the data that’s available, going back decades. There have been other periods with considerably warmer-than-normal ocean temperatures in the region. But they were never of the kind of geographic extent and magnitude we’ve seen with this recent event.
Emaciated juvenile sea lions undergoing rehabilitation at the Marine Mammal Center in California. Their plight is thought to have been triggered by the unusually warm water conditions that persist in the coastal Pacific Ocean, upsetting the usual food web upon which sea lions and other wildlife depend. (NOAA Fisheries)
Water Deeply: What caused that persistent high pressure?
Bond: It became known as the “ridiculously resilient ridge.” There’s been a number of independent studies that have basically shown that much warmer than normal waters in the far western tropical Pacific, in the vicinity of New Guinea – and thunderstorms that those warm waters helped spawn – had this kind of ripple effect on the atmospheric-circulation weather patterns over much of the globe.
It set up this series of very large-scale high- and low-pressure centers, with the ridge over the coast of western North America, and then a trough of lower pressure over the northeastern part of North America.
Water Deeply: How did the Blob affect the drought in California?
Bond: That same ridge of high pressure basically blocked the storms. There was just a real lack of those regular storms. The warm water didn’t cause the unusual weather patterns. But those unusual weather patterns that brought the warm water also were a large cause of the drought in California.
It turned out that was the same case in the Pacific Northwest. Not quite the same extent, but we were looking at very low snowpack in mid-February 2014. Then there was enough of a shift that we actually had a pretty wet period there at the end of winter and got enough rain and snow to kind of tide us through the summer of 2014. But there weren’t enough (storms), and those didn’t extend far enough south for California to get relief.
But it gets kind of complicated. Once that warm water formed out there in a big way, it does tend to warm the air that’s passing over it. Once that water was warmed, it did help warm the air coming off the ocean. This was especially the case in the winter of 2014–15. It led to warmer air temperatures and higher snow levels. The freezing level was 1,000–2,000ft (300–600m) higher than usual in the mountains. So that certainly ended up being a real problem. We count on that snowpack coming out of winter to get us through the summer. But it fell as rain rather than snow during that 2014–15 winter.
Water Deeply: Is there a climate change connection here?
Bond: This is sometimes called a marine heat wave, and it’s a short-term kind of event. There is some evidence that long-term trends are favoring the patterns we’ve had over the past few years. But that’s a very small effect.
So it’s not due to global warming. But it does provide some hint, at least, of what it’s going to be like in future decades, in particular, with some of the impacts we’ve seen in the marine ecosystem. What we’ve had the past few years is something that is liable to be more the rule rather than the exception toward the middle of the century. So maybe this is kind of a little preview or something. So we’re trying to learn from it.
Water Deeply: How has the Blob affected ocean life?
Bond: The impacts were quite a few and widespread. At the bottom of the food chain, we saw a higher preponderance at the plankton level of subtropical species versus ones that are more adapted to cooler water.
That had repercussions all the way up the food chain – everything from the kind of suitable prey for salmon that was present and whether they were getting the food they need, to some real problems with fur seals and sea lions in California in particular. In the Gulf of Alaska we had what National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has called a marine mammalmortality event last year. Seabirds are another one: There were some species with some very large mortalities, with lots more dead seabirdswashing up on the beaches.
One of the more alarming things is the harmful algal blooms. That was sort of way out there in terms of how far along the coast it stretched, how long it lasted, how high the toxin levels got. That was something that was really scary.
Water Deeply: How long will the Blob be with us?
Bond: That’s kind of the $64,000 question. We thought this whole event was winding down earlier this year, and then we’ve seen it rear its ugly head again in some locations.
Water Deeply: How will this affect our weather this coming winter?
Bond: The more prominent temperature anomalies are a little north of California. It’s all going to depend on the weather patterns. There are kind of borderline La Niña conditions now, which doesn’t tend to imply too much one way or another for Northern California. In the past, it probably has meant somewhat less precipitation than normal for Southern California. But we see a lot of exceptions there.
It’s kind of an admission of defeat, but it’s basically a crapshoot in terms of how much rain you get.
I think in terms of temperature, it’s not liable to be quite as warm as the past two winters, so that’s good, at least for the winter-sports folks. What falls in the mountains should be snow at the higher elevations. I think Northern California is liable to do OK. Southern California? Wow, that’s a tough one.
NOAA GRAPHIC – Satellite monitoring on Sept. 10 found a huge area of much warmer than normal surface temperatures in the Northeast Pacific Ocean.
LONG BEACH — The Blob, a news-making patch of unusually warm ocean surface water from late-2013 through autumn 2015, was reborn this month.
The ocean warmed quickly. As recently as July, “The northeast Pacific off our coast was slightly above normal, but nothing exceptional,” University of Washington meteorologist Cliff Mass noted Sunday on his popular blog.
By Sept. 10, some limited areas of the nearby Pacific were 5.4 to 7.2 degrees F above normal, Mass noted, while satellite monitoring shows an enormous zone of overall warmth extending west from the coasts of Washington and Oregon, north to Alaska.
News about the birth of this “Son of Blob” comes just as climate experts have officially declared this will not be a La Niña winter. The flip side of more-famous El Niño conditions that influenced the winter of 2015-16, La Niña is a pattern of unusually cold surface waters in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. It tends to result in wetter and cooler winter conditions here in the Pacific Northwest.
On Sept. 22, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will issue its new 30- and 90-day long-range forecasts, and will try to determine how the Son of Blob will influence our weather in a winter with neutral El Niño/La Niña conditions. The short-term forecast for this week is for warm and generally pleasant late-summer weather on the coast, but critical fire weather conditions for parts of the interior.
The original Blob
A result of a persistent zone of high atmospheric pressure in our part of the Pacific, the original Blob created “highly unusual weather,” according to Washington State Climatologist Nick Bond.
Ocean conditions made their way onto dry land in the form of drought and record temperatures — “2015 was by far the warmest year we’ve had in the Cascades” and “Oct. 1, 2014 through September 2015 [was a time of] record warmth in much of the Northwest,” Bond said at the 2016 Pacific County Marine Science Conference in Long Beach on May 21. Widespread forest fires and possibly the largest documented seabird mortality event in world history were linked to the 2013-15 Blob.
Mass said Sunday that experimental modeling he conducted found a modest 1 to 2 degrees F increase in land temperatures from the Blob. But even that amount of additional warmth can have a noticeable impact on snowpack and other terrestrial conditions in the Pacific Northwest.
Thousands of California sea lions, such as this one on rocks near Canada’s Vancouver Island, died in 2014 and 2015. Many starved as they struggled to find food in an unusually warm eastern Pacific.
This story appears in the September 2016 issue of National Geographic magazine.
The first fin whale appeared in Marmot Bay, where the sea curls a crooked finger around Alaska’s Kodiak Island. A biologist spied the calf drifting on its side, as if at play. Seawater flushed in and out of its open jaws. Spray washed over its slack pink tongue. Death, even the gruesome kind, is usually too familiar to spark alarm in the wild north. But late the next morning, the start of Memorial Day weekend, passengers aboard the ferry Kennicott spotted another whale bobbing nearby. Her blubber was thick. She looked healthy. But she was dead too.
Kathi Lefebvre is talking about the whales as we crunch across a windy, rocky beach, 200 miles north of Kodiak. In a typical year eight whales are found dead in the western Gulf of Alaska. But in 2015 at least a dozen popped up in June alone, their bodies so buoyant that gulls used them as fishing platforms. All summer the Pacific Ocean heaved rotting remains into rocky coves along the more than 1,000-mile stretch from Anchorage to the Aleutian Islands. Whole families of brown bears feasted on their carcasses.
Lefebvre, a research scientist at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, Washington, had examined eye fluid from one of the carcasses in a failed attempt to winnow the cause of death. Now the two of us are on Kachemak Bay in Homer, Alaska, inching toward a wheezing, dying sea otter sprawled out on the shore. Otter deaths are skyrocketing on the shoreline beneath the snowcapped Kenai Mountains, so Lefebvre is here to see whether the fates of these otters and whales are somehow intertwined.
Jellyfish-like animals known as “by-the-wind sailors” blanket an Oregon beach near an old shipwreck. Some of the same unusual wind patterns and currents that recently warmed the Pacific pushed these floating creatures by the millions onto beaches from Southern California to British Columbia. Photograph by Tiffany Boothe, Seaside Aquarium
In the past few years death had become a bigger part of life in the ocean off North America’s West Coast. Millions of sea stars melted away in tide pools from Santa Barbara, California, to Sitka, Alaska, their bodies dissolving, their arms breaking free and wandering off. Hundreds of thousands of ocean-feeding seabirds tumbled dead onto beaches. Twenty times more sea lions than average starved in California. I watched scientists lift sea otter carcasses onto orange sleds as they perished in Homer—79 turned up dead there in one month. By year’s end, whale deaths in the western Gulf of Alaska would hit a staggering 45. Mass fatalities can be as elemental in nature as wildfire in a lodgepole pine forest, whipping through quickly, killing off the weak and clearing the way for rebirth. But these mysterious casualties all shared one thing: They overlapped with a period when West Coast ocean waters were blowing past modern temperature records.
As hotter oceans destroy coral reefs in the tropics and melting ice alters life in the Arctic, it’s been easy to overlook how much warm water can reshape temperate seas. No more. Between 2013 and earlier this year, some West Coast waters grew so astonishingly hot that the marine world experienced unprecedented upheaval. Animals showed up in places they’d never been. A toxic bloom of algae, the biggest of its kind on record, shut down California’s crab industry for months. Key portions of the food web crashed. It’s not clear if greenhouse gas emissions exacerbated this ocean heat wave or if the event simply represented an outer edge of natural weather and climate patterns. But the phenomenon left daunting questions: Was this a quirk, an unlikely confluence of extremes that conspired to make life harsh for some sea creatures? Or was it, as one scientist says, a “dress rehearsal”—a preview, perhaps, of what hotter seas may one day bring as climate change unleashes its fever in the Pacific?
Humpback whales feast on fish in Monterey Bay, California. Anchovies were scarce in many areas in 2015, but so many congregated in the bay that Jim Harvey, director of Moss Landing Marine Labs, watched from his window as 50 or 60 whales dined on themat once. “That’s not normal,” he says.
While Lefebvre and I are pondering our next move, a radio call comes in. Another dead otter has surfaced on Homer Spit, five miles away. We retrace our steps to a dusty parking lot, pile into a pickup, and head off.
Beginning in late 2013, a bewildering patch of warm water formed in the Gulf of Alaska. A stubborn atmospheric high-pressure system, nicknamed the “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge,” was keeping storms at bay. Just as blowing across hot coffee frees heat, winds usually churn and cool the sea’s surface. Instead, heat within this shifting mass, which University of Washington climatologist Nick Bond dubbed “the blob,” built up and morphed into a wider patch along North America’s West Coast, where it met warm-water masses creeping north. Sea temperatures in some places rose seven degrees Fahrenheit higher than average. Some patches of ocean were hotter than ever recorded. At its peak the warm water covered about 3.5 million square miles from Mexico to Alaska, an area larger than the contiguous United States.
Lauren E. James, NGM staff. Sources: Nick Bond, University of Washington; Raphael Kudela, university of California, Santa cruz
Did planet-warming carbon dioxide from fossil fuels contribute to this event? No one knows for sure. One controversial notion suggests that the rapid retreat of Arctic sea ice is making the polar jet stream wavier, allowing weather systems to persist longer. A more accepted theory pegs this heat to normal atmospheric fluctuations in the jet stream triggered by warmth in the tropics. But even researchers subscribing to that theory don’t necessarily rule out a secondary role for climate change. “Is long-term warming somehow the puppeteer controlling things in the background?” asks Nate Mantua, at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, California. “I haven’t seen proof, but it’s clearly a prime suspect.”
Alaska’s Sick and Dying Otters
A dying sea otter takes its last breaths. The population of sea otters in Kachemak Bay is considered healthy, but the number of strandings near Homer, Alaska, in 2015 surprised scientists and volunteers, who often responded to several otter deaths in a day.
Unscrambling this weird behavior is difficult because the world’s largest ocean is so confounding to begin with. Overlapping patterns that can last for decades already drive temperature swings. Every few years or decades the eastern Pacific flips from a food-rich, cold-water place to something warmer, a cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. El Niño, the periodic tropical warming, boosts temperatures in North America. An ocean freeway, the California Current, ushers cool water south from Canada to Baja California. Along the way, winds push warm surface waters offshore, causing upwelling, which draws much cooler, nutrient-rich seas from below.
All these volatile shifts can redistribute marine life. It just doesn’t usually wind up like this. “When all is said and done, I think people will see this as the most economically and ecologically consequential event in our historical record,” Mantua says of the recent warming.
Seeking to understand the magnitude of this episode, I am miles off the Oregon coast, weeks before visiting Alaska. The Elakha, a 54-foot research boat, is cutting through rolling chop beneath a milky sky. Bill Peterson, in jeans and a weathered craft-beer T-shirt, kneels on deck, face pressed into a red cooler. It holds the contents of a net his colleagues just hauled up from the sloshing depths. The NOAA oceanographer is here to show me how thoroughly the eastern Pacific has changed. “Oh my, that’s ugly,” he says. Over his shoulder, I glance down at the bottom of the ocean food web. I see only slop the color of motor oil. That’s his point.
Near Petersburg, Alaska, a worker examines the dorsal fin of an orca. This animal likely died of natural causes, but exposure to toxic algae created by unusually warm water is a suspected cause in the deaths of many humpback and fin whales.
Every two weeks for 20 years, Peterson’s team has come here to gather the minuscule plants and animals that form the foundation of one of the planet’s most productive marine systems. The prize course in this buffet is supposed to be inch-long krill. Shaped like shrimps, they are gobbled by auklets, cohos, basking sharks, and whales. Anchovies and sardines eat them and then get wolfed by bigger fish and sea lions. At this time of year, krill should be abundant, but Peterson’s haul reveals mostly soupy algae and small jellyfish, which provide little sustenance. His team hasn’t seen krill in months. “It’s been like this nonstop,” he says.
Higher ocean temperatures have thrown this system out of whack. Not long after the warmth arrived, shelled octopuses more common in the South Pacific appeared off Southern California. Tropical sunfish and blue sharks were caught in the North Pacific. Market squid, common off California, laid eggs in southeast Alaska. A few venomous yellow-bellied sea snakes from Central America slithered across beaches near Los Angeles. Peterson’s team caught tropical or subtropical zooplankton he’d never seen: rainbow-hued, beetle-shaped copepods; minuscule iridescent creatures from Hawaii; tiny crustaceans with cobalt egg sacs. He cataloged nearly 20 new species that belonged far away.
Compared with krill, these zooplankton were limp-lettuce side salads: smaller and less nutritious. As this low-cal diet coursed through the food web, larval walleye pollock, common in the Gulf of Alaska, reached their lowest numbers in three decades. Halibut caught in Cook Inlet had mushy flesh—a syndrome associated with poor nutrition. Coho salmon returned to West Coast streams as malnourished runts. These changes coincided with other shifts. Sardines, already in decline, decreased so much that an industry made famous by John Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row shut down for the first time since rebounding from its collapse in the 1950s. Sardine and anchovy populations are cyclical; their precipitous drop likely had little to do with warm water. But the impact was more pronounced because the unusual heat redistributed the remaining fish. Anchovies, already dwindling, seemed to vanish almost everywhere except Monterey Bay, where they gathered in great numbers, creating a weird feeding frenzy. At one point, 50 or more whales dined in the bay at once. In the Pacific Northwest humpbacks cruised into the Columbia River in search of food. Birds suffered too. At least a hundred thousand blue-footed Cassin’s auklets, small gray-feathered island nesters that eat krill, starved to death. It was one of the biggest die-offs of birds in U.S. history. Then, months later, hundreds of thousands of common murres died too.
Perhaps most visible were the skinny, sick sea lion pups that surfed ashore in California, loose fur drooping over bones, looking like children wrapped in parents’ clothes. They collapsed under porches and parked trucks. One curled into a chair on a hotel patio. Another slipped into a booth at a seaside restaurant. Without sardines or anchovies, their mothers ate junk-food diets of squid, hake, and rockfish, and weaned pups early. More than 3,000 were stranded in five months.
Chugging back to his office in Newport, Oregon, Peterson is baffled. After a lifetime studying the sea, he finds this warm ocean unfamiliar and disorienting, “like looking out the window and seeing a macaw fly by.”
It’s not that the blob is the new normal. It isn’t. Few if any of these changes are permanent. Even if they were, it wouldn’t mean the sea was dying. Ocean life will continue. But the blob offers something of an analogue for future seas under climate change. And marine life in this sea of tomorrow will look very different.
Warmer temperatures speed fish metabolisms, requiring them to eat more, just as their food declines. Some fish may see tinier bodies, more disease, and, in many cases, falling populations, according to recent studies. Already, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, many fish and plankton are heading toward the poles in search of cooler temperatures. As productive areas grow scarcer with less cold water, fish and predators will congregate in fewer places, creating new challenges. During the recent heat wave, more West Coast whales appeared to get tangled in fishing gear or debris. From 2000 to 2012, rescue crews fielded about 10 reports a year. Forty-eight were confirmed in 2015.
And when creatures show up somewhere new, our relationship with the sea can shift too. In Pacifica, California, I visit Richard Shafer, a lanky 58-year-old electrician who free-dives for fish with a speargun. As the heat wave drove game fish north from Mexico, fishing charters off Los Angeles had their best season in memory. So in August 2015, Shafer took a charter to an offshore bank west of San Diego. He speared a yellowtail, and then a hungry sea lion darted past. Knowing that sea lions steal big fish, especially in the absence of sardines, Shafer pulled his yellowtail close and swam toward the boat, only to be bitten on the wrist by a seven-foot smooth hammerhead. These sharks are rarely seen in California, and rarely attack, yet there were several encounters in 2015 during what one scientist called “an endless parade of hammerheads” lured by warm water. The animal severed Shafer’s tendon and fractured a pinkie and knuckle, requiring 40 stitches. Each change in the sea can trigger another that no one sees coming.
The sky pinks with the dying day as Kathi Lefebvre hops from a pickup truck onto a pebbly stretch of Homer Spit and stares down at the dead otter. Sea wash muddies the pale fur of its face. Otters in previous years mostly died from complications of a streptococcal infection. This year some of the dead look emaciated, while others look almost fit. Interns with the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge don blue latex gloves and begin an examination. One intern is moved nearly to tears. Another tells Lefebvre about an otter she’d seen shuddering in spasms the week before. Lefebvre perks up.
“The thing you’re describing, the tremors in the whole body?” Lefebvre says. “I’ve seen that. In sea lions.”
In 1998, as a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Lefebvre learned that dozens of sea lions were turning up sick and twitchy. Lefebvre had a hunch why: Each spring, a single-celled toxic alga called Pseudo-nitzschia blooms in small patches, usually for a week, maybe two, producing a neurotoxin called domoic acid, which accumulates in shellfish. When ingested by people, this toxin can cause seizures, memory loss, even death. It also can harm wildlife. In 1961, a Santa Cruz newspaper told of a mysterious invasion of sooty shearwaters “fresh from a feast of anchovies.” The seabirds bashed into windows and died on streets. Alfred Hitchcock used the incident as part of his inspiration for The Birds. Scientists tracking the mystery decades later unearthed old samples of plankton pulled from Monterey Bay in 1961. They detected high levels of Pseudo-nitzschia.
When Lefebvre found domoic acid in the feces of sick sea lions in 1998, it was the first evidence that this type of toxic bloom could hurt marine mammals. And blooms that year were particularly bad. El Niño had brought withering ocean heat to California, igniting the most ferocious bloom on record—until last year.
In April 2015 algae bloomed, but instead of dissipating after a few weeks, the bloom grew into a monster, morphing and shifting, stretching over 2,000 miles, from California’s Channel Islands to Kodiak. No one had seen anything like it. Some shellfish harvests closed along the coast. Toxin concentrations were 30 times greater than what would normally be considered high. Tests found domoic acid in some fish, such as anchovies, at amounts too dangerous for people to eat, a rarity. The toxin appeared to sicken hundreds of sea lions, seabirds, porpoises, and seals. Video from Washington State showed a sea lion suffering a toxin-induced seizure, something never seen that far north. Blooms dragged into November.
Then there were Alaska’s dead whales, primarily fins and humpbacks. Most were too remote or too far gone to test. A few that washed up in British Columbia showed traces of domoic acid, but the toxin flushes so quickly it’s impossible to know if the dose was large or small. Scientists lacked proof, but most shared a theory: Whales ate krill, copepods, or fish dosed by algal toxins, which killed them outright or scrambled their brains, hampering navigation and feeding. “Given that we’ve ruled out most other scenarios, what is most prominent in my mind is toxic algae,” says Andrew Trites, director of the Marine Mammal Research Unit at the University of British Columbia.
Standing on Homer Spit, Lefebvre wonders aloud if algae played a role in killing Alaska’s otters. She sets down plastic bags to collect specimens and pulls on gloves. Leaning over the stiffening otter, she bends to her work.
True to its B-movie name, the blob began fading in December 2015, its heat sinking deep into the sea with the arrival of a powerful El Niño. But divining what this heat portends will take years. New research suggests that heat waves like the blob may become more common and intense because of climate change. Scientists foresee “higher extremes, more unusual events. It gets more chaotic,” says Raphael Kudela, an ocean sciences professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Scientists project that toxic blooms will be more frequent, more widespread, and more toxic.
That could spell trouble for people too. I meet Dick Ogg in his paint-splattered khakis, strolling down a wooden ramp at Bodega Bay’s Spud Point Marina. He’s rebuilding a hold on the Karen Jeanne. The commercial fisherman chases salmon, albacore, and sablefish but makes his real money gathering Dungeness crab. Yet his boat hasn’t moved much in months. Crab remained unsafe to eat long after toxic blooms vanished, so California delayed its crab harvest for months, at a loss of $48 million. The governor sought disaster relief from the U.S. government. Out-of-work deckhands lived off gift cards and a marina food bank. The closest Ogg came to fishing was helping regulators catch crab to test for toxins. “A lot of folks are really hurting,” Ogg says glumly.
Market squid, which typically spawn off California, swim by their eggs near Klemtu, British Columbia. In 2015 squid eggs in the eastern Pacific were found as far north as Alaska.
Yet not all of what the blob produced is a harbinger of something. Given warming over decades, rather than the blob’s span of roughly two years, plants and animals may adapt or move. Some die-offs might have happened without the blob. Sea star deaths, while hastened by the warm water, were actually caused by a virus that hit well before the blob. California sea lion populations may simply have grown too large.
And more changes are coming. Rising seas are reshaping coastlines. Natural low-oxygen zones in deep waters are expanding. Ocean acidification is making life harder for shellfish. Predicting the future is messy—especially when we barely understand the present.
Lefebvre never solved the otter mystery. By year’s end, 304 were dead—nearly five times the recent average. One-third of the carcasses that scientists tested were positive for toxic algae. But strep infection was diagnosed as the primary cause of death for most otters. Any role that the blob played in exacerbating the infection remains a riddle. Did algal toxins weaken the animals? Did warm water somehow make things worse? “We still don’t know how all these tweaks in our world come together,” Lefebvre says.
Weeks later, I have a similar chat with Julia Parrish, a bird expert at the University of Washington, who has been tracking the murres’ deaths. She doesn’t know if the seabirds chased scarce food to strange places, got mixed up by domoic acid, or were pushed ashore by winds. “I am still just mystified,” she tells me.
And that, more than anything, I now realize, may be our new normal: the unfathomable gulf between the sea we thought we knew and the one we’re rapidly creating.
Warm expanse that heated up West Coast waters is beaten, but not yet broken
The so-called “blob” of infamous warm ocean waters that has gripped the West Coast and shaken up its marine ecosystems in the past two years is battered, but not dead yet, NOAA scientists report.
Strong winds blowing south from Alaska toward California dominated the West Coast through much of November, bringing cold air and some new upwelling of deep, cold water that weakened the warm patches that had long made up the blob, said Nathan Mantua, leader of the Landscape Ecology Team at NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, California. Patches of ocean that had been as much as 2 to 3 degrees C warmer than average in October have now dropped sharply to around 0.5 to 1.5 degrees C above average. Some areas along the Northern California Coast have even dropped to slightly below average temperatures for this time of year, he said.
Sea surface temperature maps from early November and early December illustrate decline of the large patches of warm water off the West Coast that have become known as “the blob.” The maps chart the difference between current and average sea surface temperatures, with darker red illustrating temperatures farther above average.
The blob has become one of the best-known temporary features of the world’s oceans, a big red expanse on temperature maps that has earned headlines in the New York Times and other outlets around the world. It has also become one of the hottest topics in climatology and oceanography, with scientists looking for possible links to climate change and the California drought; shifting distributions of marine species; and the unprecedented harmful algal bloom that has encompassed the West Coast, shutting down crabbing and clamming for months.
The one main exception to the blob’s decline is a narrow band of still-warm water along the coast from Southern California to San Francisco that remains about 3 degrees C above normal for this time of year. But the band may also be an early signal of the arrival of El Niño-related ocean currents, which are expected to cause more warming along the Pacific Coast in the next few months, Mantua said.
A close-up of sea surface temperatures off the West Coast, with red illustrating areas warmer than average and blue representing areas below average.
Research scientist Nick Bond of the NOAA Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington originally coined the term, “the blob,” to describe the warm expanse. He said climate models agree the strip of warm water will remain along the West Coast, perhaps helping the blob hang on. He figures that the conditions might continue “well into 2016, and be of great enough magnitude to matter to marine ecosystems. How much is the big question.”
“Unusually warm temperatures still dominate the Pacific between Hawaii and the West Coast, but the amount of warmth is lower now than it has been for most of the past two years,” Mantua said. “As we get into the winter months, the expected El Niño influence on North Pacific weather and ocean currents includes more dramatic changes in West Coast ocean temperatures that will likely include coastal warming and offshore cooling.”
Below are the most recent sea surface temperature anomaly maps for the U.S. West Coast and the Northeast Pacific. These images are generated live from a data server, so they make take a few seconds to display.
What are you doing here? Unusual fish appear in Alaska
It’s a fascinating time to be an Alaska fish biologist, charter operator or angler. With warmer ocean temperatures caused by El Nino and a phenomenon called “The Blob,” bizarre fish sightings are pouring in from around the state, particularly Southeast.
Scott Meyer, a state fishery biologist based in Homer, is amassing photos from colleagues and boat captains who have hauled in everything from a 900-pound ocean sunfish near Juneau to warm-water thresher sharks off the coast of Yakutat since July.
“It’s unusual to have these fish caught in near-shore fisheries,” Meyer said.
The warm-water mass nicknamed The Blob has been swirling around the Pacific Ocean for the past couple of years and moving north toward Alaska. At the same time, El Nino is in full force this year, a weather pattern characterized by unusually warm ocean temperatures. As a result, ocean conditions including temperatures and food sources for fish are changing and species not normally found in state waters are showing up.
The peak of the 2015-2016 El Nino is approaching, with this year’s event among the strongest on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The Blob has raised temperatures in the North Pacific to record highs of about five to seven degrees Fahrenheit above average, according to NOAA.
Joe Orsi, a federal fisheries biologist in Juneau, said two massive sunfish swam into researchers’ gear in Southeast this summer as they conducted juvenile salmon surveys. Sunfish tend to favor warmer waters than those found in Alaska.
Other unusual reports include Pacific bonito caught in waters off Ketchikan, albacore tuna spotted near Prince of Wales Island, and yellow tail caught near Sitka.
As recently as last Saturday, an ocean sunfish washed ashore outside a lodge in Cordova.
Steve Moffitt, the state biologist who dissected the sunfish, said pilots and fishermen have reported several sightings of sunfish this summer. They were likely chasing the warmer currents and a huge mass of jellyfish that filled the waters around Cordova, he said.
“Sunfish really like to eat jellyfish,” Moffitt said.
California market squid are also starting to spawn in Southeast, Orsi said.
While the usual fish sightings are interesting from a biological perspective, they may be a cause for concern, Orsi said. One of his top questions: if ocean temperatures rise, how will big-money fish like salmon be affected?
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game forecast the Southeast pink salmon harvest in 2015 at 58 million fish, yet fishermen hauled in only about 34 million pinks, according to state records.
Did The Blob and El Nino cause the low catch level? Hard to say definitively but it’s “certainly easy to point the finger at them,” said Dave Harris, Fish and Game’s commercial fishery management biologist in Juneau.
“Those are the most likely suspects,” Harris said.
Permalink | Categories Breaking News on October 12, 2015 by FishingNews | Comments Off on Pacific Bonito and Albacore Tuna Among Non-Native Fish Species Sighted in Alaska’s Warmer Waters Tags: El Nino, fish sightings, The blob
It’s the crack of dawn on a recent morning at Fisherman’s Landing in Point Loma, and the docks are bustling.
Dozens of enthusiastic anglers have just returned with a boatload of bluefin tuna, dorado and yellowtail.
It’s been a banner season, said Andrew Dalo, who books reservations for Point Loma Sportfishing.
“I’ve got overnight and day-and-a-half boats that are catching 100- to almost 200-pound bluefin tuna up off our coast here, out west and up north,” Dalo said. “And that’s stuff that we don’t even normally see up here, let alone go after.”
Point Loma Sportfishing – A group of anglers on a Point Loma Sportfishing expedition pose with their bluefin tuna catches, weighing 100 to 200 pounds each, July 29, 2015.
The tropical fish are typically reeled in off Mexico and far off-shore, Dalo said. Now they’re being hooked as close as 10-20 miles off of San Diego, where water temperatures are exceptionally warm.
“Right now we’re 4 to 5 degrees above normal, which to you and me doesn’t seem like much, but if you’re an animal living in the sea and you live at that temperature — that’s a huge change,” said Toby Garfield, director of the Environmental Research Division at Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla.
The warm water, which scientists have named “the blob,” formed two years ago near Alaska and has spread down the West Coast. Garfield said the warm conditions have sent mother nature into disarray.
“In fact, having this additional warm water has changed the winds a little bit,” Garfield explained. “The upwelling winds really drive the productivity along the California coast. So if you reduce that productivity, you start changing a lot of different parts of the whole ecosystem.”
Much of the fishery population has shifted north, and El Niño hasn’t even arrived yet, said Garfield, who analyzes ocean conditions and reports his findings to the Pacific Fishery Management Council.
“If you go out and do an assessment and you’re not sure where that population is from, you can get some erroneous results in terms of how you’re going to divide up the fisheries,” Garfield said. “And remember, the fish don’t know there’s a Mexican border or Canadian border.”
“We really do have a front row seat on a fascinating change,” Garfield added. “We haven’t seen it this anomalously warm in the record, and at the same time, we’re having a developing El Niño.”
Garfield said he sees two possible scenarios playing out this winter: El Niño’s storm energy will stir up the water, causing the cool water from the ocean depths to mix with and cool the water at the surface.
“That’s one scenario — that it may disappear and will go back to more normal temperatures,” Garfield explained. “The other scenario is that the two will reinforce each other and we’ll have even warmer conditions, and the weather patterns will be different than we expect with a normal El Niño.”
Garfield says additional heat from El Niño could produce storms with higher energy and moisture.
Meanwhile, the telltale signs of current ocean water temperatures from “the blob” have appeared in recent months along San Diego’s shores. The unusual visitors range from hammerhead sharks to tropical fish to millions of red tuna crabs.
“We’ve also seen ‘by the wind sailors’ that have occurred en masse on the shores here on La Jolla and elsewhere,” said David Checkley, a professor of marine biology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Checkley said the reduction in upwelling of cold water nutrients from the ocean floor has drastically altered the food web.
“At the base of the food chain it’s been observed that the amount of chlorophyll or phytoplankton is lower than normal because we have fewer nutrients brought up into the surface waters,” Checkley said.
Phytoplankton provide food for a wide range of sea creatures including whales, shrimp, snails, and jellyfish, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration.
An algal bloom occurring along the West Coast from California up to Alaska is also a growing concern.
“Those harmful algal blooms sometimes come with toxins — demoic acid that can poison marine mammals that eat fish that consume those algae,” he said.
Checkley said water temperatures will likely eventually return to normal, but he can’t help but look at the conditions as a harbinger of the future.
“What perhaps is worrisome is if you think of things such as this and a long-term trend in a rise in temperatures associated with the climate warming or climate change,” Checkley said.
He predicts some sea creatures will suffer through El Niño.
“The winners are the recreational fishermen,” Checkley said.
San Diego’s sportfishing season usually wraps up in September, but not this year.
“We’re hoping this stuff stays around,” Dalo said. “If it stays up here, we can fish in U.S. waters. You bet. We’ll fish into October. We’ll fish into November.”
NASA – This map of the West Coast shows sea surface temperature anomalies in the Pacific Ocean in March 2015. They show how much above (red) or below (blue) water temperatures were compared to the long-term average from 2003 to 2012.
By Susan Murphy – Tuna crabs blanket the shoreline at Ocean Beach in San Diego, June 12, 2015.
Read the original post and watch the video: www.kpbs.org
A huge swath of unusually warm water that has drawn tropical fish and turtles to the normally cool West Coast over the past year has grown to the biggest and longest-lasting ocean temperature anomaly on record, researchers now say, profoundly affecting climate and marine life from Baja California to Alaska.
Researchers remain uncertain what caused the mass of warm seawater they simply call “the blob,” or what it’ll mean long term for the West Coast climate. But they agree it’s imperative to better understand its impact, as it may be linked to everything from California’s drought to record numbers of marine mammals washing up on Northern California shores.
The blob — that’s the technical term — first appeared in late 2013 as a smudge of warm water near Alaska. It then expanded southeast and merged with warm waters farther south, growing into an anomaly that extended from the Aleutian Islands to Baja California and stretched hundreds of miles west toward Hawaii.
“Just the enormous magnitude of this anomaly is what’s incredible,” said Art Miller, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla. He was among nearly 100 scientists from Canada, the U.S. and Mexico who gathered recently at Scripps for the first time to share research about the warm-water mass.
The warmest ocean temperatures in the blob now are around 5 degrees Fahrenheit above average.A huge swath of unusually warm water that has drawn tropical fish and turtles to the normally cool West Coast over the past year has grown to the biggest and longest-lasting ocean temperature anomaly on record, researchers now say, profoundly affecting climate and marine life from Baja California to Alaska.
Researchers remain uncertain what caused the mass of warm seawater they simply call “the blob,” or what it’ll mean long term for the West Coast climate. But they agree it’s imperative to better understand its impact, as it may be linked to everything from California’s drought to record numbers of marine mammals washing up on Northern California shores.
The blob — that’s the technical term — first appeared in late 2013 as a smudge of warm water near Alaska. It then expanded southeast and merged with warm waters farther south, growing into an anomaly that extended from the Aleutian Islands to Baja California and stretched hundreds of miles west toward Hawaii.
“Just the enormous magnitude of this anomaly is what’s incredible,” said Art Miller, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla. He was among nearly 100 scientists from Canada, the U.S. and Mexico who gathered recently at Scripps for the first time to share research about the warm-water mass.
The warmest ocean temperatures in the blob now are around 5 degrees Fahrenheit above average.
“They’re just so far off the mean that they’re shocking,” Miller said.
The blob continues to evolve. In the last month, seasonal upwelling of cooler water in Northern California has split it into two separate masses once again. And 2015 is shaping up to be an El Niño year, marked by unseasonably warm waters off the coast of South America. What researchers don’t know is if El Niño will exacerbate or neutralize the blob.
Researchers agree that unusually slack winds are to blame for the warming ocean off the West Coast, though they don’t know what drove the drop in wind. Stronger winds typically cause deep, cooler water to rise to the surface.
“If you don’t blow the wind as much, you don’t stir the ocean as much,” Miller said. The same mechanism, he said, also may be preventing rainfall from reaching California.
In August, a temperature sensor in Monterey Bay picked up its highest temperature reading ever recorded, said Francisco Chavez, a physical oceanographer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. On land, 2014 was the hottest year on record in California and temperatures remained higher than average until spring of this year.
Less ocean stirring also reduces upwelling of nutrient-rich deep water to the surface, which researchers think is directly related to die-offs in some marine mammals and declines in sardine fisheries. The dearth of nutrients cascades up the food chain through the ecosystem, resulting in less phytoplankton and hungrier sea lions and seals.
In 2014, the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito saw more stranded California sea lions and northern elephant seals than average, according to center marine scientist Tenaya Norris, and record numbers of dying Guadalupe fur seals have washed up so far in 2015. Norris said that only about 60 percent of the mammals they rescue recover enough to be returned to the wild.
This year, sea lion pups in particular are stranding much earlier than usual, a sign that their mothers are abandoning them — an alarming indication that there’s just not enough food in the water.
“It’s a failure on the mothers’ part to adequately provision the pups,” Norris said. “They’ve been successfully foraging for years, so they should be able to find food if it’s out there.”
Paradoxically, Chavez said, 2014 in Monterey Bay was a “bonanza” for many species of birds, dolphins and whales. He hypothesized that nutrient upwelling didn’t disappear; it just shifted into cooler water closer to the coast, condensing an ecosystem that typically stretches tens of miles to only a few miles offshore. It’s unclear, however, whether the warm-water blob has played a role in the unusual number of dead whales — a dozen so far this year — that have washed ashore along Northern California beaches.
With still so many unknowns, the researchers in La Jolla agreed to meet again this coming fall. Until then, they all have homework: run climate models and dig deeper into data for patterns in weather, ocean chemistry and marine life.
“I don’t think that we found the smoking gun at the meeting,” Chavez said.
