Should we fear The Blob? How warm mass of Pacific water could threaten B.C.’s marine ecosystem and climate
By Susan Lazaruk, The Province October 18, 2015
QUEEN CHARLOTTE CITY, HAIDA GWAII — The nickname for a mass of warm water that’s been sitting off the west coast of North America for two years may sound like something out of a sci-fi movie, but “The Blob” is very real for the people of this northern B.C. archipelago who make their living off the sea.
The higher sea surface temperatures are well documented by scientists and ocean-watchers, who are perplexed by how wide the warm swath is and where it came from.
Many fishermen have noticed temperatures higher than normal for early autumn. They also report bigger and longer “red tides,” or harmful algal blooms, and an abundance of southern marine species — including pomfrets, sunfish, leatherback turtles and even great white sharks.
Some salmon fishermen are worried about how The Blob might affect the future of the salmon fishery.
One oceanographer has a theory that it may be responsible for killing whales at a faster rate than usual.
“It (the sea surface temperature) seems to be staying warm longer,” Richard Aiken, a Haida professional tour guide based in Queen Charlotte who also fishes for food, said on a tour of the inlet near the village.
“Right now, it’s pushing 58 degrees, 57 degrees (Fahrenheit),” he said, pointing to the thermometer aboard his boat, which remained at the same temperature for an hour-long tour. “In previous years, water temperatures were down near 52 degrees, 53 degrees this time of year.”
The Blob, so named by University of Washington climate scientist Nick Bond, is a circular mass of warm water that stretches about 1,600 kilometres offshore and almost the entire 3,000-plus km of the West Coast from California to Alaska. It’s almost 100 metres deep. The Blob is one to four degrees Celsius warmer than normal for the North Pacific.
The mass has been parked offshore since mid-2013. (To see an animation of sea surface temperatures over the years, go to 1.usa.gov.)
It’s a phenomenon that has never been seen before, according to the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington.
Last spring, Bond attributed the mild 2014 winter to The Blob and predicted that the summer of 2015 would be warmer than usual. (It turned out to be one of the warmest and driest on record.)
He also predicted The Blob, which scientists say is not linked to climate change, will remain until the end of this year at least.
“The Blob is new to us,” said fisherman Sascha Jones. “We’ve never seen that before. For it to stick around that long is strange. Is it just a one-time occurrence or is it here for good? We don’t know.”
SPECIES FOLLOW FOOD TO NORTHERN WATERS
“It’s definitely warmer than usual,” said Ian Perry, a researcher with the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans, during a recent satellite call from the Canadian Coast Guard’s research ship the John P. Tully.
He said ocean temperatures are reaching as high as 17ºC (62ºF) offshore, which is one or two degrees above the usual high for this time of year.
“We’re seeing a change in the bottom part of the food chain because of the warmer water,” said Perry. “There’s an increase in phytoplankton (tiny marine plants), in some places seen as harmful algal blooms. There’s also been more zooplankton (tiny marine animals) like jellyfish and sea butterflies, as they thrive in the warm waters.
“The ocean sunfish, the mola mola, which is like a big Frisbee, and can be as large as two or three metres” are following the plankton up north, said Perry.
Most fishermen who have spent their lives fishing around the islands agree there have been changes in marine life.
“We’ve seen a considerable number of sunfish,” said Aiken. “The jellyfish this year was really bad. For the months of June, July and part of August, the west side (of the islands) was seeing high concentrations of jellyfish in all the areas we were fishing.”
Fisherman Willie Davies caught some pomfrets, a fish indigenous to the South Pacific, this year. “This is the first time I’ve seen them since the 1990s, during the last El Niño,” he said.
During that El Niño, a weather phenomenon that usually lasts nine to 12 months and brings warmer and drier winters, Davies noticed a huge influx of mackerel, not usually fished up north. They ate up the salmon fry and killed the herring fishery. He worries they may return.
“It was like a plague of locusts descending on us,” Davies said. “We were shaking those things out of our gear all the time that year.”
Wade Collinson, aboard his vessel at the Queen Charlotte dock after returning from a fishing trip, said, “Definitely this year, for sure, the tropical fish were noticed earlier in the year than I’ve ever noticed them before. We’re still seeing blue sharks right now. You usually see them (only until) later in the summer.”
But not all fishermen have noticed changes. Tuna fisherman Lindsey Doerksen, 63, who’s been fishing for 50 years, the last 40 or so on Haida Gwaii, said he’s been keeping an unofficial log of water temperatures for decades and has recalled the waters reaching the high 50s over the years. Aboard his ship the Ahab, he pulled out his old pilot logs and pointed to entries dating back to 2004, when he recorded sea temperatures as high as 62ºF.
Doerksen said he doesn’t think this year is that unusual. “Every now and then you’ll catch a weird fish,” he said. “The strangest thing I’ve seen are turtles.”
He said he’s seen the occasional great white shark in the waters this far north, as well as “lots of salmon sharks and blue sharks.”
JELLYFISH, MACKEREL, ALGAE THREATEN SALMON
Scientists speculate that salmon, which grow in a multi-year cycle, could suffer in years to come because of The Blob.
The changes in the ecosystem will likely affect both sport and commercial salmon, said DFO researcher Ian Perry. Since jellyfish and mackerel, which are voracious consumers of young salmon, are thriving in the warm water, there may be fewer salmon in years to come.
Dick Sparrow said he hasn’t seen the water temperatures this warm for this long in the 21 years he’s been fishing off Haida Gwaii.
“It was 64 to 67 degrees (Fahrenheit) out there” on a recent fishing trip, he said. “It’s way different this year.”
He said salmon fishermen figured out where the salmon were, in a cool spot north of Reynolds Sound. “They were just holding there.”
Locals reported a huge chinook run this year. But Sparrow said they were smaller, noting that of about 200 chinook on a recent haul, “only one was over 30 pounds” when usually most are bigger than that.
Fisherman Neil Davies also noticed smaller chinook. “Overall, the average size was smaller just because there were more fish competing for food,” he said.
Some fishermen said there was so much algal bloom that they couldn’t gill net.
IS BLOB'S TOXIC BLOOM KILLING WHALES?
UBC professor Andrew Trites is among scientists who wonder if The Blob could have killed 30 whales along the West Coast this summer.
None of the fin whales or humpback whales whose carcasses washed up on the shore of the Gulf of Alaska and on B.C.’s coast this summer showed any sign of trauma, emaciation or sickness that you would expect to see, he said.
“If they were killed by entanglement with fishing nets, debris or being hit by a ship, there would be broken bones or bleeding,” he said. “Basically, they all appeared to be relatively healthy.”
That led researchers to a theory that the whales were killed by a toxic algae bloom called demonic acid, or pseudo-nitzschia, which proliferates in warm water. The toxic algae would have been consumed by the krill and sardines that whales consume, and if the whales ingested enough of it, they would be poisoned, he said.
“We don’t know for sure that it’s killed the whales but we’re left with only one explanation so far.”
WHAT WILL HAPPEN WHEN THE BLOB MEETS EL NINO?
The Blob in the Pacific Ocean may be to blame for the extreme drought along the West Coast, say experts. Climate scientists at the University of Washington theorize that when winter air crossed over the warmer-than-usual Pacific Ocean last year, the air wasn’t cooled as much as it would have been normally. That meant warmer, drier weather from California to Alaska.
We should brace for even stranger weather patterns if a strong El Niño hits as expected this fall, say forecasters. El Niño is expected to bring another warm, dry winter to the coast. And how The Blob will affect the weather is something scientists will be studying closely.
“The El Niño hasn’t started yet. We’re actually still waiting for the real show,” said the DFO's Perry, referring to the migration of more southern species to northern waters along with the warmer ocean currents. “I think there will be more unusual fish as a result of the warm water, as a result of this Blob.”
Environment Canada is predicting a 90 per cent chance El Niño will last through this winter.
Unusually dry, mild weather in January would affect forests, reservoirs, fisheries, forestry, ski operations, tourism, agriculture and winemaking, said Simon Donner, a climate scientist in UBC’s geography department.
THE CANADIAN WHO DISCOVERED THE BLOB
The Blob was first noticed by Canadian scientist Howard Freeland in late 2013 while he was monitoring data from robots stationed in the Pacific Ocean to record temperatures.
He’s retired from the DFO but he keeps an eye on the data “as a hobby.”
He noticed on his computer screen that the water over a large area was 3ºC warmer than normal. It showed up as red on the digital map.
“It does kind of look as though someone dropped a huge and very ripe tomato on the Gulf of Alaska,” he said.
Freeland was excited to share the discovery and presented a report at a “state of the ocean” meeting in early 2014, surprising other scientists in attendance.
“It’s a very large, very intense anomaly, a big deviation from normal,” he said, adding that 3-4ºC “is a lot of heat in the ocean.”
As for what caused the anomaly in the first place, Freeland said, “We honestly don’t know. It just suddenly appeared.”
A suggestion that radioactive fallout from the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant after Japan’s 2011 earthquake could have caused the warmth doesn’t bear up because there were barely detectable traces of radiation on the monitoring robots, and it would take a lot of energy to heat the water mass to that degree, said Freeland.
It’s also unlikely that The Blob is caused by seismic activity since the heat descends only to 100 metres, said Freeland.
Neither he nor other scientists are pointing a finger at climate change as the cause of the “episodic” event.
“I tend to be reluctant to assess one episode to global warming,” he said
