ENVIRONMENT19 November 2022
An illustration shows how unusually hot the waters were in May 2015 due to the Blob. The deepest red is 3 degrees Celsius above average.(Chelle Gentemann, Chares Thompson, and Jeffrey R. Hall/PO.DAAC/JPL)
Nicknamed ‘the Blob’, a large patch of abnormally warm water covering a section of the Pacific Ocean from 2014 to 2016 behaved just like a B-grade horror movie, having a devastating impact ona wide variety of species.
A new study on the Santa Barbara Channel off the Californian coast highlights how this environmental horror show continues to affect marine ecosystems.
The Blob caused significant shifts in aquatic ecosystems at the time, particularly impacting sessile animals, those stuck in place like anemones. This latest research shows that six years later, underwater populations inhabiting the kelp forest ecosystem still aren’t back to where they were.
While the levels of…
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