'The blob', a huge marine heatwave, killed nearly a million seabirds in the biggest known die-off of

[Judi Lynn]

ABC Science
By environment reporter Nick Kilvert
Posted 53 minutes ago

Back in 2015–16, about 62,000 dead or dying common murres — a North Pacific seabird — washed ashore between Alaska and California.

Only a fraction of the dead birds made it to shore, and the total number of deaths was estimated to be close to a million birds.

Researchers think it was the largest seabird die-off in recorded history.

Compounding the deaths, at least 22 colonies completely failed to produce any offspring over several breeding seasons.

Now a major study has concluded that the die-off was the result of a huge disruption to energy flow through food webs, precipitated by "the blob" — an unprecedented mass of warm, nutrient-poor water that emerged off the Pacific coast of the US from 2013.

More:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2020-01-16/blob-seabird-murre-die-off-climate-change-marine-heatwave/11867264

[Control-Z]

1. Every damn day.

Every damn day there's a new and horrifying report of climate change devastation.

Every damn day.

[IndyOp]

2. Oil spills anyone? The ocean is huge, huge, huge but it is still a finite amount of water.

At some point, the oil and toxins will not miraculously "dissipate" - as they seemed to do in the past.


"Yet since the iconic 1969 oil well blowout in Santa Barbara, California, there have been at least 44 oil spills, each over 10,000 barrels (420,000 gallons), affecting U.S. waters. The largest of which was the 2010 Deepwater Horizon well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico."

https://response.restoration.noaa.gov/oil-and-chemical-spills/oil-spills/largest-oil-spills-affecting-us-waters-1969.html