A few weeks ago, a strange fish was found, dead, on the shore near Seaside, Oregon. The fish turned out to be a king-of-the-salmon, which typically lives at ocean depths of greater than 1600 feet. It is almost never seen in coastal waters.
His appearance is the harbinger of a disturbing new phenomenon that may be an unpredicted, yet horrific and potentially catastrophic, side-effect of global warming.
Get the skinny below the flip...
According to articles published
here and
here, Oregon now has a 2100 square-mile zone of oxygen-free water stretching off of its coastline.
From Wednesday's Seattle Times:
On Tuesday, underwater video cameras remotely operated from this research vessel sent back a starkly different view -- a reef barren of fish but littered with what researchers estimated as thousands of carcasses of decaying crabs.
Worms, normally dug into sea sand, drifted dead along the bottom.
"It's just a wasteland down there," said Francis Chan, an Oregon State University marine ecologist aboard the Elakha. "I didn't expect to see anything quite like this."
And from the Oregonian:
Dead Dungeness crabs off Cape Perpetua, just south of Yachats, "were like jellybeans in a jar. You just can't count them, there were so many."
According to the article, researchers suggest that the emergence of this dead zone may be linked to a weakening of Southern winds that has been predicted by computer simulations designed to illustrate changes caused by global warming:
The dead zone is caused by coastal upwellings as patterns that normally sustain life in the rich coastal waters become more erratic and destroy some life. The normal patterns are a mix of northerly winds that allow upwellings of cold, nutrient-rich deep water to occur and southerly winds that move about the oxygen-poor water.
The Pacific Northwest dead zone results from strong northerly winds that allow the cold water to surface without any mixer winds from the south. This produces a series of upwellings that pile too much oxygen-poor water into the coastal zone.
Researchers at OSU said the erratic wind patterns of recent years are consistent with changes predicted in computer models that attempt to simulate the effects of global warming.
But Oregon's dead zone isn't the only one we've seen in recent weeks. Another dead zone-- this one 6660 square miles -- is a now-recurring phenomenon in the Gulf of Mexico.
Who knows how long it will take for us to recognize and reverse some of these impacts -- assuming they are still reversable.