![]() Since 2014, a mass of unusually warm water has hovered and swelled in the Pacific Ocean off the West Coast of North America, playing havoc with marine wildlife, water quality and the regional weather.Įarlier this year, weather and oceanography experts thought it was waning. But no: The Blob came back, and it is again in position off the coast, threatening to smother normal coastal weather and ecosystem behavior. The Blob isn’t exactly to blame for California’s drought, though it certainly aggravated the problem. But it is to blame for seriously disrupting the ocean food chain and for creating conditions that fed unprecedented algal blooms in the coastal Pacific. ![]() ![]() With the Blob back in play again, what does it mean for the winter ahead? To find out, Water Deeply spoke with Nicholas Bond, a research meteorologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and Washington’s state climatologist. Water Deeply: What exactly is the Blob? Washington’s state climatologist Nicholas Bond named the warm ocean mass now commonly known as “the Blob.” (Nicholas Bond) In June 2014, Bond named this persistent weather phenomenon, and later wrote the first scientific paper characterizing it. Nicholas Bond: It’s a large mass of water in the northeast Pacific Ocean that’s considerably warmer than usual. It doesn’t have any real sharply defined boundaries, but it’s an area that, at times, has stretched from Baja California up to the Bering Sea. At other times, it’s kinda shrunk back down. It’s been at least 1,000 miles (1,600km) across and, recently, quite deep. Typically, it’s been something like 2.7– 3.6F ( 1.5– 2C) warmer than normal. But there have been places where it’s been as much as 9F ( 5C) warmer. events have become more common for birds, fish and marine invertebrates. Requires: Mass Effect 3: Omega, by killing Oleg Petrovsky. A mass mortality event (MME) is an incident that kills a vast number of individuals of a. It’s waxed and waned, but it’s been that way since early 2014. The Alliance Marine Reconnaissance Unit flies recon drones and. The warmer-than-normal water extends down to something like 300m (1,000ft) below the surface. So that’s a huge volume of considerably warmer-than-normal water. Water Deeply: Is it still out there?īond: Yeah.
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