(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.
