The Climate Crisis

Dead Zone

If you ever wondered what "the web of life" or "interconnected environment" meant, the Climate Crisis is providing a hard-knocks schooling. It works in two ways, really: we find situations no one dreamed had anything to do with each other actually have a lot to do with each other (usually in a very dismaying way), and we find the Climate Crisis having effects on different places and parts of our lives, even our memories.

Case in point: I spent my 40th birthday on the beach at Lincoln City, Oregon. I'd been in Portland to give a speech on my last book, and do research for what I expected would be my next book. I delayed flying back east to spend my birthday at the ocean, and took a bus across to a hilltop inn with an ocean view. So that's the first thing I thought of when I read this today:

Bottom fish and crabs washing up dead on Oregon beaches are being killed by a recurring "dead zone" of low-oxygen water that appears to be triggered by global warming, scientists say. The area is larger and more deadly than in past years, and there are signs it is spreading north to Washington's Olympic Peninsula. Scientists studying a 70-mile-long zone of oxygen-depleted water along the Continental Shelf between Florence and Lincoln City have concluded it is being caused by explosive blooms of tiny plants known as phytoplankton, which die and sink to the bottom.

Exactly how this happens, and how the effect feeds on itself, is described in this article. But here's the conclusion:

"If we continue like we are now, we could see some ecological shifts," Barth said. "It all depends on what happens with the warming and the greenhouse gases."Dead zones in other places around the country, such as Hood Canal in Washington and the Mississippi River Delta off Louisiana are caused by agricultural runoff fueling blooms of algae that rot and deplete the oxygen, said Lubchenco. But dead zones like the one off Oregon also occur off Namibia and South Africa in the Atlantic and off Peru in the Pacific. "We're not really sure what is down the road. If it's just for a short period of time, it will not be as devastating as if it starts lasting a significant fraction of summer," she said.

It's not the sea overtopping Manhattan, or the permafrost melting to turn the planet into Jurrasic Park. It's not even malaria spreading with the increased range of mosquitoes. But it's a real effect, that changes our lives in small ways. Here a small way, there a small way, it all begins to add up.

Like what a lot of people are doing this summer. Big power blackouts in Queens and Staten Island, storms and power down in St. Louis. And speaking of dead zones, that's becoming another name for apartments of the elderly in three-digit heat waves: in the 11th day of plus 100F temps in California, the estimated heat related death toll has risen to 86.