A prolonged heatwave and an epidemic of sea star wasting disease rattled marine ecosystems along the Pacific Coast in what researchers said was a harbinger of future conditions as the oceans continue to warm. Those effects, detailed in a new study by scientists at Oregon State University, will have implications far beyond the seas, per the Oregon Capital Chronicle.
And we’ll have fun fun fun ’til the climate takes the ocean away (Photo via the Oregon Capital Chronicle)
The study focused on conditions at four capes in Oregon and California from 2004 to 2020, where researchers noted major shifts in marine species after a heatwave known as the Blob, which lingered over the west coast for more than 700 days between 2013 and 2015. Some species, like mussels and phytoplankton, flourished during that time, but others declined, including several types of kelp as well as ochre and sunflower sea stars. Those populations have still not returned to normal, a low resilience that researchers said does not bode well for the future.
“These changes occurred after the loss of adult ochre sea stars due to an epidemic of sea star wasting disease and during a three-year marine heatwave when water temperatures were extremely warm,” said Zechariah Meunier, an Oregon State doctoral graduate and the study’s lead author. “Sea stars are like the wolves of rocky shores because they normally eat enough mussels and barnacles to prevent these invertebrates from dominating the lower elevation areas. And many kelps did not survive the thermal stress during the heatwave.”
“A warming climate will make restoring baseline conditions more difficult,” he added.
You don’t say. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Those prolonged disruptions will impact life well inland, jeopardizing everything from greenhouse gas emissions and breathable oxygen levels to commercial fisheries, Meunier said. All are caused by humans, he added.
“Like many environmental issues, I find it all comes back to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, using resources sustainably and protecting critical habitat – not for use by humans but for use by other species,” Meunier said.
Wildlife regulators are, by and large, still struggling to adapt to this reality, at least from a management perspective. Fishery officials have found it difficult to respond to the onset of climate change in Alaska, where dramatic disruptions to data collection and seafood harvest regularly bump up against the bureaucratic realities of government intervention, the Alaska Beacon reported.
“Climate change — slow — has been going on a long time,” Bob Foy, director of science and research at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, said last week during a two-day climate scenarios workshop. “It’s the extreme nature of climate change, it’s the next heatwave, which is coming, that we have to be prepared for.”
Netting a fish. (Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)
It’s not clear how to do that, really. Officials were caught off guard by the effects of the Blob heatwave, which raised water temperatures drastically enough between 2018 and 2019 to wipe out populations of Pacific cod in the Gulf of Alaska and snow crab in the Bering Sea. The ensuing collapse of the crab fishery was a shock to biologists, who had expected robust populations in 2019 based on data collected in the Bering Sea in 2018.
It’s not that they should have predicted the opposite, necessarily, according to Elizabeth Siddon, a fisheries biologist with the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. But the data likely indicated some sort of seismic environmental response, she said.
“The black swan events like 2018 and ‘19 are always going to be difficult to predict, but I think what we learned in hindsight is we should expect large ecosystem impacts of these big climate extremes,” she said. “We shouldn’t expect to be able to be able to predict exactly what the ecosystem will do, but we should expect that the ecosystem will respond. And I think that’s the uncomfortable part.”
Look at this flower it might fall into a pit (Photo via the Nevada Current)
Federal land managers are expected to begin gauging public feedback on a proposed lithium mine project that could degrade nearly a quarter of critical habitat for an endangered Nevada wildflower. Thousands of people submitted comments on the project’s draft environmental impact survey before the collection period closed last week, pitting conservation-minded opponents against supporters who view the proposed lithium-boron mine as a windfall for economic development, the Nevada Current reported.
The project — a 200-acre open-pit quarry — would be based in Rhyolite Ridge, one of the only two major known global deposits of lithium-boron, a key mineral in batteries for portable electronic devices, vehicles and grid storage applications. The mine is expected to create around 850 jobs — 500 during the construction phase and 350 during operations, generating an estimated $125 million in annual wages during the project’s 26-year lifespan.
It would also sit just 114 feet from the largest known subpopulation of Tiehm’s buckwheat plant, a rare wildflower listed as endangered by federal regulators in 2022. About 22% of the plant’s protected habitat — about 900 acres of land in all — overlaps with the mine proposal, which estimated that 11% of the damage would likely be permanent. Two separate reports also warned that the plant itself could physically slide into the open pit, concerns that conservation groups said Ioneer has done little to address.
“It’s almost a certainty that Tiehm’s buckwheat will end up at the bottom of the pit on a long timeframe,” said Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin Director for the Center for Biological Diversity., “Maybe not 10 years, but in 100 years it’s almost guaranteed.”
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is expected to release a final environmental review and a record of decision for the project before the end of the year. For now, Ioneer officials seem confident in their chances.
“Listening has made our project stronger, and we look forward to addressing feedback to the Bureau of Land Management from the public comment period,” Bernard Rowe, the group’s managing director, said in a statement. “We are excited to complete the remaining steps in the federal permitting process, begin construction, and provide the critical components set to power millions of American electric vehicles.”
