July 30, 2021 — As the Pacific Ocean’s cool waters hugged Oregon’s rugged shore, Nick Edwards, a seasoned commercial fisherman, could not believe his eyes. Stretching over at least 100 yards, he said, were the carcasses of hundreds of Dungeness crabs piled in the sands of a beach south of Cape Perpetua.
Hypoxic areas in Oregon, researchers found, have surfaced every summer since they were first recorded in 2002 — leading scientists to determine a recurring “hypoxic season,” akin to wildfire and hurricane ones.
However, climate change has exacerbated its effect, said Francis Chan, the director of the Cooperative Institute for Marine Resources Studies at Oregon State University, resulting in increasingly frequent and extensive hypoxic areas that can morph into “dead zones,” where the total lack of oxygen kills off species that cannot swim away, much like the Dungeness crabs.