Waters off New England in Midst of Record Year for Warmth:
The waters off of New England are already warming faster than most of the world's oceans, and they are nearing the end of one of the hottest summers in their history.
That is the takeaway from an analysis of summer sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Maine by a marine scientist with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland. The average sea surface temperature in the gulf was nearly 5 degrees Fahrenheit above the long-term average during one 10-day stretch in August, said the scientist, Andy Pershing, who released the work Thursday.
Aug. 8 was the second warmest day in recorded history in the gulf, and there were other sustained stretches this summer that were a few degrees higher than the average from 1982 to 2011, Pershing said. He characterized this year as "especially warm" even for a body of water that he and other scientists previously identified as warming faster than 99 percent of the global ocean.
[...] The Gulf of Maine is a body of water that resembles a dent in the coastal Northeast, and it touches Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Atlantic Canada. It's the nerve center of the U.S. lobster fishing industry, an important feeding ground for rare North Atlantic right whales and a piece of ocean that has attracted much attention in recent years because of its rapid warming.
[...] The warming of the gulf is happening at a time when the center of the U.S. lobster population appears to be tracking northward. America's lobster catch is still high, but rising temperatures threaten to "continue to disrupt the marine ecosystem in this region," said John Bruno, a marine ecologist with the University of North Carolina who was not involved in Pershing's work.
The warming waters are causing a migration of lobsters northward which is having repercussions in Maine's $400+million lobster fisheries. This story in Bloomberg, Maine's Lobster Tide Might Be Ebbing explores what may lie ahead:
The numbers came in earlier this month on Maine's 2017 lobster harvest. By historical standards, the 110.8 million-pound, $434 million haul was pretty spectacular. But it was a lot lower than 2016's 132.5 million-pound, $540 million record, and it was another sign that the Great Lobster Boom that has surprised and delighted Maine's lobster fishermen since the 1990s -- and brought lobster rolls to diners from coast to coast -- may be giving way to ... something else.
[...] Given how quickly the lobster harvests grew, though, especially from 2007 through 2012, it's hard not to wonder whether they might not eventually collapse. They already have in several states farther down the Atlantic coast. Lobster landings were still on the rise as of 2016 (data aren't available yet for 2017) in New Hampshire and Massachusetts but peaked in Rhode Island in 1999, Connecticut in 1998, New York in 1996 and New Jersey in 1990.
[...] Offering more of a hint on timing are the American Lobster Settlement Index readings made by the University of Maine School of Marine Sciences along with fisheries agencies in the U.S. and Canada. The settlement index measures the density of baby lobsters in quadrants of rocky seafloor, and its readings started declining off the coast of Maine about a decade ago. It takes five to 10 years for a lobster to reach harvestable size, so "the downturn in Maine's landings is indeed consistent with our ALSI based forecast," University of Maine zoologist Rick Wahle wrote in an email.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Friday August 31 2018, @05:39PM (12 children)
That happens in another like 2-3 degrees C of global temperatures. Right now we're still at the "oh global warming actually costs money to live through" consequences.
I'm not thrilled to be young enough to live through the "Yeah, there's no seafood anymore, it's gone" stage in 40 years or so.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @05:59PM (7 children)
So, when earth was warmer, there was no seafood? Good to know, that now, or 200 years ago, was and will always be the ultimate optimum temperaturewise ever.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Friday August 31 2018, @06:28PM (5 children)
Finish the thought.
"Uh actually things have changed before" without omitting "Changes at this rate of change have only ever accompanied mass extinctions in the past" second half of that thought.
We already have "deadzones" with nothing we'd consider seafood in them brought about by dumping perfectly healthy plant nutrients into the water a little too fast. Conditions changing rapidly enough, will asolutely mean that only extremely simple r-selected species are adapted to it, and it will take centuries for the new niches to fill out, and that's assuming the algal blooms don't lead to the chorlotoxic earth scenario.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @06:45PM (2 children)
"Chorlotoxic"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @06:51PM
https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/new-and-more-toxic-normal-harmful-algal-blooms-find-new-habitats-changing-oceans [earthmagazine.org]
Some algae produce toxic chemicals, if you get a large enough algal bloom then the toxin level rises and sea life dies off. Thankfully the algae will produce oxygen so we may not have land based animals die off as completely...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ikanreed on Friday August 31 2018, @07:04PM
The other AC got the source that describes the scenario, but basically, some algae synthesize the sodium out of salt water as a tool to help it manage homeostasis of its intracellular medium. This leaves behind elemental chlorine. Normally this happens in an environment with predators that have different regulatory mechanisms and the sodium neutralizes with the chlorine over the long run.
If, however, this particular kind of plankton becomes the dominant part of planet-wide algal blooms, the atmosphere becomes filled with unreasonably high levels of chlorine and "sensitive" organisms like say homo sapiens do not survive well.
It's not a likely or primary scenario for global warming, but's a recently identified plausible case.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 01 2018, @02:50AM
Let us keep in mind that we don't actually know much about rates of change of climates in the past. Passage of that much time erases fine detail. A classic example of the error is to take the state of Earth before the Permian-Triassic extinction event (the worst mass extinction ever known) and after its onset, and draw a straight line in between. Who knows? Maybe the above extinction event was surprisingly smooth?
But near present volcanic activity tends to be very episodic with periods of light or dormant activity separating periods of much higher activity. Such volcanic activity from the Siberian Traps (which are the largest known volcanic activity on Earth) may have resulted in reoccurring climate change much more rapid than the modern era.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Saturday September 01 2018, @05:49AM
I logged on to mod you up before bothering to look at your already being +5.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @06:48PM
Don't be willfully obtuse, it really doesn't help things.
Fisheries will probably collapse along with entire ecosystems. There will still be fish, but the die off could be enormous to the point where commercial fishing is less viable. There will be less sea food, and depending on how bad the environmental problems get you may see it disappear from most markets completely.
That said, life tends to adapt rather quickly so the temporary die off may result in other fish populations replacing the previous ones.
Now THAT being said, the first point is rather important because sea food supports a lot of the human population. The collapse of even one major ecosystem could cause sweeping food scarcity problems that have a systemic impact on all food prices and availability.
But hey, this global warming stuff is bunk, who needs to listen to scientists and their warnings? Who cares about micro-bead plastics getting into the ecosystems we rely on, who cares about toxic pollution turning our water tables into poison? The list goes on, humanity has prioritized money over life and we will all reap the rewards of that short sighted greed.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 31 2018, @06:26PM (3 children)
If they would ban all harvesting in 50% of the oceans, the other 50% would produce 4x as much as we're currently getting. It has been tried in places like Belize, New Zealand and the Florida Keys, it works, but you've got to really enforce the no-take rules in the protected areas.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Friday August 31 2018, @06:32PM (2 children)
This is true. Collective resource management is important. But those actions aren't making the the great barrier reef not dead. Some problems are truly global.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 31 2018, @09:31PM
True enough - habitat destruction doesn't just take place in geographic areas, we spread our excrement in the air and water too...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 01 2018, @03:01AM
Hypothetical actions (which != actual actions) generally don't.
More important than climate change here. Because you can prevent a collapse of fisheries in the face of climate change, if you stop overfishing. But managing climate change doesn't prevent a fishery collapse from overfishing.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Entropy on Friday August 31 2018, @09:27PM
If it was under the average temperature they would say it's global warming too. Also as no one ever seems to mention we're actually in the last stages of an ice age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation [wikipedia.org] .. What happens after an ice age ends, I wonder?
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday August 31 2018, @09:45PM
"Mmmmmm....more lobsters make Gaaark something something..."
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---