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.
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.
The blob that cooked the Pacific
When a deadly patch of warm water shocked the West Coast, some feared it was a preview of our future oceans.
This story appears in the September 2016 issue of National Geographic magazine.
On January 10, 2019, a group of scientists reported in the journal Science that the world’s oceans nearly doubled the amount of heat they absorbed from the atmosphere—about 93 percent of all extra heat from climate change, and faster than previously thought. So far, because the oceans are vast, the baseline temperature of the water has shifted upward by only a fraction of a degree, but even that seemingly slight change has affected weather patterns, marine life, and sea levels around the world. And these new estimates line up with climate models, adding heft to their predictions, which show ocean warming accelerating even faster in the future.
On October 19, 2018, Nick Bond, a University of Washington atmospheric scientist, said that sea surface temperatures across thousands of miles of the North Pacific and Gulf of Alaska are now up to 3 degrees Celsius warmer than normal, "which is quite a bit." A ridge of high pressure is keeping skies warm and dry, allowing heat to build up. Storms predicted for next week could cool these seas. If not, though, the region could see a return of "The Blob," which from 2013 to 2016 thoroughly upended the marine world. See our September 2016 story for more on what happened then, and what's at stake now.
On January 10, 2019, a group of scientists reported in the journal Science that the world’s oceans nearly doubled the amount of heat they absorbed from the atmosphere—about 93 percent of all extra heat from climate change, and faster than previously thought. So far, because the oceans are vast, the baseline temperature of the water has shifted upward by only a fraction of a degree, but even that seemingly slight change has affected weather patterns, marine life, and sea levels around the world. And these new estimates line up with climate models, adding heft to their predictions, which show ocean warming accelerating even faster in the future.
On October 19, 2018, Nick Bond, a University of Washington atmospheric scientist, said that sea surface temperatures across thousands of miles of the North Pacific and Gulf of Alaska are now up to 3 degrees Celsius warmer than normal, "which is quite a bit." A ridge of high pressure is keeping skies warm and dry, allowing heat to build up. Storms predicted for next week could cool these seas. If not, though, the region could see a return of "The Blob," which from 2013 to 2016 thoroughly upended the marine world. See our September 2016 story for more on what happened then, and what's at stake now.
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