Marine heatwave Archives - Saving Seafood

The El Niño stars are aligning in record-breaking ways. Here’s how the high tides stack up

October 16, 2026 — With homes nearly toppling into the ocean and back-to-back floods and hurricanes amplifying our sense of dread, keeping track of all things El Niño can be overwhelming.

So I called up Patrick Barnard, who spent years leading the U.S. Geological Survey’s renowned coastal hazards team in California and now helms key climate adaptation research at UC Santa Cruz. A maestro at bringing together all manner of data, Barnard broke down the numbers in no-nonsense terms — explaining why the coming weeks and months might bring extreme flooding like we’ve never seen before.

“All the stars are aligning for a pretty dramatic winter,” said Barnard, as he pored over the El Niño tea leaves, so to speak, and rattled off every high tide phenomenon on track to converge by the holidays. “If you start stacking all these things up, the flood risk just goes up exponentially.”

How Will El Niño Affect Your Local Fisheries?

October 8, 2026 — What does El Niño mean for U.S. fisheries and marine life? What can fishermen and coastal communities expect to observe and experience as this event continues and potentially intensifies? And what are scientists at NOAA Fisheries doing to track this natural phenomenon?

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation is a powerful atmospheric cycle that occurs in the Pacific Ocean along the Equator and weakens trade winds that blow from east to west. This allows warm surface water in the Pacific to slosh back east towards the Americas. It reduces the amount of cold water upwelling that usually occurs off the coast of South America. This natural phenomenon can have intense atmospheric and oceanographic effects, such as increased precipitation, flooding, and warmer ocean temperatures. These impacts vary by geographic location but are typically felt most directly by regions within the Pacific Basin.

In June 2026, NOAA forecasters announced that El Niño had formed in the tropical Pacific. As of October, they have predicted a greater than 83 percent chance of a “very strong event” during the Northern Hemisphere fall and winter 2026–27. Experts expect this event will persist through early spring 2027, with the potential for observable impacts in marine ecosystems for months or even years afterwards.

Scientists still can’t predict exactly what will occur during this period. But NOAA Fisheries can draw upon historic observations and an abundance of data collected throughout previous El Niño events to suggest likely impacts across our ecosystems. Additionally, we are actively deploying tools and strategies to monitor and predict El Niño’s impact on the marine environment across the United States, including:

Surveys aboard NOAA vessels and aircraft
Ocean sampling using uncrewed vehicles such as gliders
State-of-the-art ocean and biological response forecasting models
Cooperative research engaging local commercial and recreational fishermen

Learn more about what you can expect from this El Niño event and what NOAA Fisheries is doing to forecast and document its impacts.

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries

Study finds El Niño events can boost nutrients in Gulf of Alaska

September 23, 2026 — The Gulf of Alaska is particularly vulnerable to the effects of events like marine heatwaves and El Niños, which can devastate its lucrative fisheries. But a new study has found El Niños can offer some benefits to the Gulf of Alaska.

Élise Beaudin is a physical oceanographer at a research facility called Ocean Networks Canada in British Columbia, and a lead author on the study, which was published in the Journal of Physical Oceanography on Sept. 10. Her research focused on what’s called the Alaska subpolar gyre, which is basically a giant counterclockwise swirl of water, thousands of miles wide, that goes around the Gulf of Alaska and into the waters around eastern Russia.

She said she was interested in studying the subpolar gyre for two reasons. The Gulf of Alaska provides critical habitat for Alaska’s fisheries. And she said it’s also interesting because of the way water circulates.

“The center of the subpolar gyre in Alaska, is extremely depleted in nutrients, especially micronutrients,” Beaudin said.

Those nutrients, like iron, silicate, and nitrate, are essential for phytoplankton, which are the base of the food chain that feeds everything else in the ocean. Beaudin said the phytoplankton living in the nutrient-depleted areas survive because of eddies, which are smaller rotating swirls inside of the gyre.

Read the full article at KMXT

Ocean Indicators We’re Tracking for El Niño’s Arrival on the West Coast

September 5, 2026 — Has El Niño reached the West Coast?

You might think it has. After all, the ocean off Southern and Central California is unusually warm. But that is from a recent marine heatwave predates the current El Niño. Much of the Pacific Coast is experiencing relatively normal conditions while still awaiting the impacts of what could be a very strong El Niño.

In June, NOAA’s National Weather Service declared that El Niño had developed. That finding, however, is based on ocean temperatures from the tropical Pacific Ocean, near the Equator, which warm ahead of El Niño’s impact on the Americas.

While eastern tropical Pacific temperatures have already risen more than 2°C (about 3.6°F) above normal, El Niño-related warming along the West Coast typically lags that increase by a few months. NOAA Fisheries scientists are tracking West Coast conditions as part of our Integrated Ecosystem Assessment. Here are some of the changes in ocean conditions and marine life that typically signal the arrival of El Niño’s influence along the West Coast.

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries

Two giant warming patterns are brewing in the Pacific and warping US weather

September 2, 2026 — In the north-east Pacific Ocean, an immense and persistent heatwave is wreaking havoc on marine life and weather patterns.

“It’s a really bright red eyeball in the Pacific,” says Andrew Leising, a research oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa). “It’s huge, it stretches across the whole [ocean].” The Pacific heatwave, which formed in May 2025, is already bringing surface temperatures 3-4C (5.4-7.2F) above average for this time of year, according to Leising.

Add to that: a massive warming pattern known as El Niño is brewing further south. El Niño is a weather phenomenon that pushes up global temperatures, and it is also supercharging Pacific Ocean warming. It is expected to intensify this autumn to become the strongest El Niño in living memory.

This combination of a massive marine heatwave and a “super El Niño” is rarely seen. Here are five impacts we can expect to see – and where they will happen.

Read the full article at the BBC

Kelp’s crisis is the fleet’s crisis

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.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Birds Are Dying. Clues Point to El Niño.

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.

Read the full article at The New York Times

MASSACHUSETTS: A challenging but ‘priceless’ life of a lobsterman

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.”

Read the full article at the Plymouth Independent

El Niño’s ‘whole different ocean’ to send odd sea creatures to US

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.

Read the full article at USA TODAY

Chinook salmon in decline, worsened by Bering Sea heatwave a decade ago: study

July 30, 2026 — Yukon River Chinook salmon numbers have been in a decline for decades. Despite efforts to help the population recover, it has dropped nearly 90 per cent since the 1980s.

Now, a new study from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says a four-year heatwave in the Bering Sea that started about a decade ago has been connected to a more recent drop in population.

Curry Cunningham, one of the co-authors of the study and an associate professor with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said researchers have noticed two periods of decline in the Chinook salmon population between 2003 and 2023.

Cunningham said before 2013, the salmon experienced a short decline followed by a few years of recovery.

But by 2016, conditions started to change again.

“That’s led to this very depressed state we currently find ourselves in,” Cunningham said. “[It] seems to be associated in time, at least with the onset of this marine heat wave that we saw in the eastern Bering Sea.”

Read the full article at CBC News