August 12, 2026 — The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump is ending support for NOAA’s annual report on the state of the Arctic.
NOAA Spokesperson Kim Doster told CNN that the 2026 Arctic Report Card will not be facilitated through the agency. However, Doster added that the data that historically contributed to the product “will continue to be collected and will remain publicly available.”
August 11, 2026 — A strengthening El Niño could bring the highest sea levels ever recorded to the California coast this year, raising the risk of widespread and damaging flooding.
It’s the latest effect forecast for what’s expected to be an historically strong event, one forecasters warn could also lash Southern California with powerful rain and broil both land and sea with punishing heat waves.
“We’re expecting likely the highest sea levels ever recorded on the California coast associated with this event,” said Mark Merrifield, director of the UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Center for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation.
During a recent online town hall, Merrifield presented a NASA satellite image showing sea levels already more than half a foot higher in the eastern Pacific Ocean compared to the reference state, and said by this fall and winter, “we should be seeing sea levels far above the average seasonal cycle.”
According to NASA, El Niño’s warmer ocean water displaces colder water close to the sea surface. Warmer water causes a rise in the sea surface height because water expands as temperature rises.
Data collected by scientists over the years also have shown how El Niños contribute to “enormously strong” waves, which can cause beaches to “erode and to narrow,” Merrifield said. “It’s well documented that during El Niño events, beaches across the entire state tend to move landward by about 30 meters [98 feet] or so.”
August 11, 2026 — As of June 2026, El Niño has officially arrived. This naturally recurring phenomenon is characterized by warmer-than-normal water temperatures in parts of the equatorial Pacific along with changes to atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns. Its regional effects range from desert floods to delayed monsoons to shifts in where tropical cyclones are more likely to form.
NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center expects the current El Niño to continue to strengthen through the end of 2026, with a 97 percent chance of lasting through early Northern Hemisphere spring 2027. Even during El Niño’s early stages, satellites have observed characteristic changes along the equatorial Pacific, such as warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures and higher-than-normal sea surface height.
Among the first ecological downstream effects are changes to the marine food web. The maps above show chlorophyll-a concentrations—the pigment present in most phytoplankton—as observed by the OCI (Ocean Color Instrument) on NASA’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) satellite. In June 2025 (left), conditions were neutral, while in June 2026 (right), El Niño was strengthening.
August 11, 2026 — Kelp forests in the United States are under threat and are facing the same stresses as the commercial fisheries that work around them. The Forest of the Sea by David Helvarg, published in May, tells the story of kelp, the importance of healthy kelp forests, and the challenges these habitats face. While this book is not about commercial fishing, it does include fishermen, and its insights are vital to those who make a living harvesting wild fish from a rapidly changing sea.
Kelp forests have evolved as the anchor habitat for nearshore ecosystems in the cold waters of temperate climes across the globe. Helvarg dives into the ecological and economic importance of kelp forests, and how they’re under threat as waters warm and other environmental stressors diminish their footprint, often drastically so.
As a commercial fisherman on the West Coast and as a journalist covering fisheries and oceans for more than 15 years, the health of fisheries and the health of kelp forests have mirrored each other from my vantage point. Since the Blob, the extreme marine heatwave that hit the West Coast from 2014-2016, whale entanglements ravaged the California Dungeness crab fishery while 90 percent of the Northern California kelp forests disappeared. This isn’t a situation where one affects the other, but parallel plot lines in the same story.
Helvarg, a veteran journalist who also serves as the executive director of Blue Frontier, an ocean advocacy NGO, uses Fort Bragg, Calif., as an example of just this. The shoreline of the small city nearly 200 miles north of San Francisco has historically been dominated by thick kelp forests teeming with life. It has also been an important commercial fishing port for Dungeness crab, salmon, and groundfish.
August 10, 2026 — Crab populations in the Bering Sea are struggling. And researchers say climate change is a big cause. A new tool described in a study published Aug. 3 in the Journal of Geophysical Research Oceans will help researchers predict one of climate change’s biggest threats to crabs: ocean acidity. The study’s authors hope their work can help crabbers and fishery managers.
“I’m excited with this new model and study,” said Jamie Goen, the executive director of the nonprofit trade association Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers. “It will help us better understand what could be happening and how that might impact fisheries.”
Darren Pilcher, the study’s lead author and an oceanographer at the University of Washington, said he started the study because of requests from fisheries stakeholders.
The ocean absorbs a quarter of our carbon emissions, which make the water more acidic when the two mix. Acidic conditions are harmful for many different animals. This is especially true for shellfish, like crabs.
“They can eat more, and that helps a little bit, only to a certain point,” Pilcher said. “In fact, in some of the previous experiments with red king crab, if you lower the pH to a value of 7.5, the crab just die.”
Scientists have pointed to factors from climate change, like ocean acidification, as the reason the number of Bristol Bay red king crabs has plummeted in recent years. Goen said that other species, like snow crab, have also tanked.
August 7, 2026 — Every month, Giovanny Suárez Espín walks a beach near his home in southern Ecuador, monitoring for dead seabirds. Usually, he sees maybe a handful.
But on recent surveys, the sand has been littered with carcasses.
“Every 10 steps you took, you found five or 10 birds, and it kept going,” said Suárez, who works for American Bird Conservancy, a nonprofit group. “On the three-kilometer walk, we saw lots of dead birds the whole way.”
In June, Suárez and others tallied 638 dead birds on the beaches of three provinces in Ecuador, about seven times the number found over the previous year and a half combined.
“It’s painful,” he said.
In July, they counted an additional 968.
It’s too soon to say for certain what has caused the spike in deaths, which has affected various species, including sooty shearwaters, Peruvian and blue-footed boobies, cormorants, petrels and the critically endangered waved albatross. Die-offs in sea birds aren’t uncommon, and can stem from a variety of factors. In 2023, Ecuador saw mass deaths from avian influenza, said Sebastián Cruz, a seabird ecologist who runs the South American marine bird program for American Bird Conservancy.
But this time, he said, looks different. The birds’ bodies are emaciated. Testing for bird flu is needed, but the few necropsies that have been conducted, along with the behavior of surviving birds, show no signs of infection. And critically, sea surface temperatures off the coast have been exceptionally elevated.
This points to an alarming possibility: The seabirds could already be victims of the building El Niño, a natural climate phenomenon whose effects are now occurring while the planet dangerously warms.
In recent months, as scientists have predicted an El Niño that could be the strongest in recorded history, the attention has focused on how it could hurt humans. And it could hurt us a lot, potentially bringing record heat, drought and torrential rain.
But wildlife stands to suffer, too. Marine mammals and seabirds are among the most at risk.
August 7, 2026 — Global aquaculture firms and the wider value chain entered the second half of 2026 facing a difficult combination of constrained supply, rising feed costs, climate uncertainty, and uneven consumer demand, according to Rabobank’s latest Global Aquaculture Update.
After weathering several major disruptions over the past decade, the industry has now entered a phase in which climate change, tightening feed ingredient supplies, and geopolitical uncertainty are reshaping global seafood markets, Rabobank Seafood Analyst Novel Sharma told SeafoodSource, explaining the industry should plan for continual uncertainty rather than treat each challenge as an isolated disruption.
August 3, 2026 — A lot has changed since Tom O’Reilly threw his first lobster pot in the ocean more than four decades ago.
Back then he was using wooden traps which had to be laden with rocks so they would sink to the sea floor. Once the wood became waterlogged the rocks were no longer needed, but they were heavy even when empty. Each pot was hauled up one at a time using only muscle power, a slow and arduous task. And he worked year ‘round.
Now 65, O’Reilly – a big, affable man with short cropped white hair and piercing blue eyes – employs a “stern man,” currently 18-year-old Kyle Moyen, of Manomet. Wooden traps have been replaced by lighter, coated wire traps strung together in groups of 15, each separated from the others by 90 feet of rope. To get the traps up to the boat, Moyen uses a grappling hook to grab the rope just underneath each buoy and O’Reilly threads the rope onto a winch-like device mounted on the starboard rail. He calls it a hauler (brand name: Hydro Slave) and it does most the heavy lifting until each trap is brought alongside the boat where Moyen wrangles it onto the rail. As for lobster fishing year ‘round, that, to O’Reilly’s chagrin, has been reduced by state regulation to help save the endangered North Atlantic right whale, of which fewer than 400 remain.
When I moved to Plymouth in late 2024, I was surprised the following spring to see so many lobster buoys bobbing in Plymouth waters. It was widely reported that even Maine’s coastal waters were becoming too warm to sustain the lobster population, forcing them north into Canadian waters.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the waters of Cape Cod Bay and the Gulf of Maine, of which Cape Cod Bay is a part, are warming faster than most global marine environments. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute concludes climate change has caused average summertime water temperatures in the Bay to warm by more than 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1970s. That may not sound like a lot, but even a one-degree average rise can mean the difference between thriving and dying for some species. Local oystermen cite warming waters for a drastic reduction in the local mussel population, for example.
O’Reilly doesn’t dispute the data, but says over the past ten years the temperature has been stable.
“People may disagree with me on this,” O’Reilly says, “but I’ve monitored the water temperature every day for the past ten years, and I don’t see it rising.”
He points to one of the monitors on his boat, the 36-foot Karen M, built in Maine in 1991 and named for O’Reilly’s wife. The monitor shows the water temperature is 65 degrees. “Normally, this time of year, it should be about 70,” he says, “and the lobster population is stable.”
July 31, 2026 — An intensifying El Niño is forecast to make it “a sharky summer” off the California coast, with greater numbers of white sharks arriving with warmer waters from the south, but they are far from the only marine life expected to make surprise visits.
Strong El Niños can move several species of sharks, as well as rays, tropical fish, birds and even sea snakes northward into waters where they rarely appear.
“We expect to see all kinds of weird tropical things come up with this warm water,” said Douglas McCauley, director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
The strongest El Niños – and this one is forecast to be among the very strongest – can alter entire marine ecosystems, shifting both animals and the food they need to survive.
Its ripple effects in winds, rain and ocean currents can extend across the world’s oceans. Studies have linked El Niño and its cooler water counterpart – La Niña – to starving sea lions in Peru, changes in sea turtle behaviors in the Caribbean and fisheries successes in the Amazon and Congo rivers.
El Niño can trigger “a lot of animal movement,” said Nate Jaros, a vice president of animal care at the Aquarium of the Pacific.
This summer, juvenile sharks and other aquatic visitors are turning up early, thanks to the effects of an intense marine heat wave already in place before El Niño arrives, McCauley said.
“We’re already seeing Mahi mahi. You’ll see more bluefin tuna, and you see weird stuff, like we’ll see more sea turtles and sea snakes,” McCauley said.
July 31, 2026 — New Jersey’s back bays, those lush wetlands that sit between the barrier island beach towns and the mainland, are home to unknown numbers of baby sharks that feast on the American eel, crabs and small fish that thrive in the coastal salt marshes. Giving birth to litters in those food-rich shallow waters like Little Egg Harbor is just about all the maternal care given to the shark pups by their mothers, who swim back out to the Atlantic Ocean soon afterwards.
The tiger shark, the sandbar shark and the smooth dogfish return each summer to the Jersey coast to give birth between June and July, utilizing the safety of shallow waters that are free from predators that would devour their newborns. Although the smooth dogfish can grow to 3 feet long, the babies are no larger than 12 inches at birth and litters range in size from four to 20 pups. The dogfish are benthic feeders, meaning they forage along the bottom of the marsh.
“We all have our favorite shore towns,” said Adrianna Zito-Livingston, an ecologist who works as the climate adaptation project manager for the New Jersey Nature Conservancy. “We come back year after year. The sharks are doing the same thing.”
The Nature Conservancy is working with Monmouth University to research the health of the salt marshes that have become eroded due to the impacts of climate change. As part of that work, researchers like Zito-Livingston are tagging the sharks with acoustic trackers that are then monitored by listening stations placed along the Jersey coast. She said the sharks provide a good indication of the health of the salt marshes.
“In a lot of ways, sharks are a canary in the coal mine,” she said. “They’re top predators and healthy sharks with a good distribution are indicative of healthy, diverse ecosystems.”