ocean anoxia – Desdemona Despair

A sick sea lion and her pup are shown recovering from domoic acid poisoning at the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro, California, on 6 July 2023. During the summer of 2023, the center cared for sea lions that were sickened by a historically bad algal bloom along California’s Coast. Photo: Yannick Peterhans / USA TODAY

July 9, 2023

“Death coming out of the ocean”: Red tide killing California sea lions, dolphins – “I have been a marine mammal veterinarian for 35 years, and this is definitely the worst in my professional lifetime”

By Amanda Lee Myers 8 July 2023 (USA TODAY) – Jalapeño the sea lion turned up on a crowded California beach in a daze, experiencing seizures and heavily pregnant. Instead of giving birth in a remote location like sea lions prefer, Jalapeño had her pup on Southern California’s Hermosa Beach on a busy Saturday, surrounded by throngs […]

A seagull walks over seaweed that washed ashore on 16 March 2023 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. A huge mass of sargassum seaweed formed in the Atlantic Ocean and headed for the Florida coastlines and shores throughout the Gulf of Mexico. The sargassum, a naturally occurring type of macroalgae, spans more than 5,000 miles. Photo: Joe Raedle / Getty Images

April 18, 2023

Video: Sargassum seaweed hits Florida Keys beaches

By Richard Burkard 17 April 2023 (Knewz) – It sounds like a B-grade movie title: The approach of the 10-million pound blob. Yet it’s real, and it’s forcing swimmers and owners of beachfront property in Florida to take action. Knewz noted in late March that a giant mass of sargassum seaweed was spotted from space. It […]

People up for Easter sunrise services on Cocoa Beach, Florida encountered heavy seaweed, 9 April 2023. Photo: Malcolm Denemark / Florida Today

April 15, 2023

Sargassum seaweed soils Space Coast beaches at record levels in 2023 – “This year’s Sargassum bloom will likely be the largest ever recorded, with major impacts throughout the next few months”

By Jim Waymer 12 April 2023 (Florida Today) – We’re already in the weeds. All that stringy stuff that washed up on Brevard County beaches this past week is just the beginning of what scientists predict will grow into the largest-ever bloom of Sargassum seaweed ever recorded. Sargassum, which the Caribbean Sea delivers seasonally to the Gulf Stream […]

This image based on satellite photos shows the massive belt of sargassum seaweed blooming across the Atlantic Ocean and drifting onto beaches in Florida and the Caribbean in February 2023. Graphic: Chuanmin Hu / University of South Florida

March 30, 2023

Record-breaking algae bloom takes aim at Florida beaches – “This year could be the biggest year yet”

By Dinah Voyles Pulver 14 March 2023 (USA TODAY) – Beachgoers in Florida and the Caribbean could be greeted by heavy blankets of smelly seaweed in the weeks ahead as a 5,000-mile swath of sargassum drifts westward and piles onto white sandy beaches. Sargassum, a naturally occurring type of macroalgae, has grown at an alarming rate this winter. The […]

In this image taken from footage provided by the RU-RTR Russian television on Sunday, 4 December 2022, journalists and Interdistrict Environmental Prosecutor’s Office employees walk near the bodies of dead seals on shore of the Caspian Sea, Dagestan. A top Russian environmental official said Monday that the thousands of dead seals that washed up on Russia’s Caspian Sea coast likely died from oxygen deprivation. Photo: RU-RTR Russian Television / AP

December 5, 2022

Russia: Mass seal death likely due to oxygen deprivation

MOSCOW, 5 December 2022 (AP) – A top Russian environmental official said Monday that the thousands of dead seals that washed up on Russia’s Caspian Sea coast likely died from oxygen deprivation. Officials in the republic of Dagestan, which has a long coastline on the world’s largest inland body of water, said this week that […]

Aerial view of apparent red tide and other phytoplankton species in the water near Naples and Sanibel, Florida on 13 November 2022. According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, beaches from Sarasota to Port Charlotte varied between low, medium, and high levels of red tide. Because Hurricane Ian brought so much rain to Florida in October, scientists on the coast closely monitored water quality to see if the storm had any impacts. Photo: Ralph Arwood / Calusa Waterkeeper

November 20, 2022

Photos show toxic algae blooms plaguing southwest Florida waters – Runoff from Hurricane Ian suspected

By Dylan Abad 14 November 2022 TAMPA, Florida (WFLA) – Aerial photos revealed massive plumes of red tide stretching along much of southwest Florida’s coast days after Tropical Storm Nicole passed over the state. Photos released by Calusa Waterkeeper showed a deep reddish-brown discoloration of the water near Naples and Sanibel due to the presence […]

What appears to be a shark washed up on Keller Beach in Point Richmond on 24 August 2022. Photo: William Fitzgerald

September 3, 2022

Environmental group reports “unprecedented” algae bloom, fish dying across SF Bay – “This appears to be a substantial fish kill, most likely related to the unprecedented red tide algal bloom we have been tracking for the past month”

By Alyssa Goard 28 August 2022 (Bay City News) – Environmental nonprofit San Francisco Baykeeper is reporting that an algae bloom is happening across the San Francisco Bay, something they believe is unprecedented in the history of the bay. Additionally, in the past week Baykeeper said it’s received an increasing number of reports of dead […]

Projections of annual counts of high-tide flooding (HTF) days for the NOAA Intermediate Sea Level Rise (SLR) scenario. The NOAA minor flooding threshold is used for Honolulu, San Diego and St. Petersburg. The NOAA moderate flooding threshold is used for Boston to highlight a threshold that is not yet routinely exceeded, which is not the case for the Boston minor threshold. The 50th percentile from the ensemble of projections (blue line) and the 10th–90th percentile range (blue shading, with the 90th percentile highlighted in orange) show increasing numbers of HTF days per year. The year of inflection (YOI, open black circle) for each projection corresponds to abrupt increases in the frequency of HTF days, which are highlighted by comparing the projected increases (Δ) over two adjacent ten-year periods (dashed and solid black lines). Graphic: Thompson, et al., 2021 / Nature Climate Change

August 16, 2021

Sunny-day flooding is about to become more than a nuisance – “What’s scary about this paper is the idea of the inflection point. Can we adapt fast enough to keep pace?”

By Jim Morrison 2 August 2021 (WIRED) – During the summer of 2017, the tide rose to historic heights again and again in Honolulu, higher than at any time in the 112 years that records had been kept. Philip Thompson, director of the Sea Level Center at the University of Hawaii, wanted to know why. […]

Global pattern in the cumulative development of coastal hypoxia in the periods before 1969, 1970-1989, and 1990-2015. Each red dot represents a documented case related to human activities. Green dots are sites that have improved. Since the 1960s, the global number of hypoxic systems has about doubled every ten years up to 2000. Data: Based on Diaz and Rosenberg (2008), Diaz, et al. (2010), and Conley et al. (2011). Graphic: Laffoley and Baxter, 2019 / IUCN

December 10, 2019

Oceans losing oxygen at unprecedented rate, experts warn

By Fiona Harvey 7 December 2019 MADRID (The Guardian) – Oxygen in the oceans is being lost at an unprecedented rate, with “dead zones” proliferating and hundreds more areas showing oxygen dangerously depleted, as a result of the climate emergency and intensive farming, experts have warned. Sharks, tuna, marlin and other large fish species were […]

June 9, 2019

As oceans warm, microbes could pump more carbon dioxide back into the air

By Kevin Krajick 29 April 2019 (Columbia University) – The world’s oceans soak up about a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans pump into the air each year — a powerful brake on the greenhouse effect. In addition to purely physical and chemical processes, a large part of this is taken up by photosynthetic plankton as they incorporate carbon into their […]