Monday, October 29, 2018

Scientists Declare Annual ‘Dead Zone’ Season Off Pacific Coast (Politico, Morning Energy)


(Washington, DC) – State ecologists on the West Coast say there is a new ‘season,’ akin to wildfire season: The time of year in which falling oxygen levels on the seafloor kill off commercial fishermen’s catches.

"We can now say that Oregon has a hypoxia season much like the wildfire season," Francis Chan, co-chair of a California task force tracking the growing problem known as hypoxia, told NPR on Sunday.

It’s become a regular danger: "Every summer we live on the knife's edge and during many years we cross the threshold into danger – including the past two years," Chan said. "When oxygen levels get low enough, many marine organisms who are place-bound, or cannot move away rapidly enough, die of oxygen starvation."

The presence of warmer water off the U.S. Pacific Coast, attributable to global warming, is causing oxygen levels on the seafloor to disappear, killing off the crabs and other sea creatures that commercial fishermen rely on.

Feds still plugging away on climate under Trump: The Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is funding research to help policymakers understand the problem amid rising global temperatures, according to its website.

“Changes in both global and regional climates have the potential to make coastal and marine ecosystems even more vulnerable to hypoxic conditions,” says the agency. NOAA's coastal climate change program is conducting interdisciplinary research to understand the relationship between ecosystem function and climate change, it says.