Peering into the murky depths, Jane Lubchenco searched for sea life, but all she saw were signs of death.
Video images scanned from the seafloor revealed a boneyard of crab skeletons, dead fish and other marine life smothered under a white mat of bacteria. At times, the camera’s unblinking eye revealed nothing – a barren undersea desert in waters renowned for their bounty of Dungeness crabs and fat rockfish.
“We couldn’t believe our eyes,” Lubchenco said, recalling her initial impression of the carnage brought about by oxygen-starved waters. “It was so overwhelming and depressing. It appeared that everything that couldn’t swim or scuttle away had died.”
Upon further study, Lubchenco and other marine ecologists at Oregon State University concluded that that the undersea plague appears to be a symptom of global warming. In a study published in the journal Science, the researchers note how these low-oxygen waters have expanded north into Washington and crept south as far as the California state line. And, they appear to be as regular as the tides, a cycle that has repeated itself every summer and fall since 2002.
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