Warming Pacific Makes for Increasingly Weird Ocean Life
A “blob” of warm water that’s partly to blame for dead birds and stranded sea lions in the Pacific may share a cause with Boston’s snows and California’s drought.
The baby sea lions started washing ashore in high numbers in 2013. But the Pacific along the U.S. West Coast really got weird in 2014, when fishermen started catching ocean sunfish and warm-water thresher sharks—off Alaska.
Since then, hungry young Cassin’s auklets have died by the thousands and Central American birds like brown boobies began showing up in California’s Farallon Islands. This week the number of starving sea lion pups stranded on southern California beaches hit 2,460 —roughly 20 times higher than the average over the last 10 years.
Scientists now believe these changes are all loosely connected to a giant swath of warm water sitting in the eastern Pacific. The northern portion of that
