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.”

To start, the waters off the California coast have been the hottest they have ever been at this time of year. Multiple temperature records have been shattered, and an intense marine heat wave has been churning since last December — making our typical high tides even higher — El Niño notwithstanding.

Warm water, put simply, expands, whereas cold water takes up less space. And this heat wave alone, Barnard explained, has already made sea level rise temporarily by about 6 inches.

Now add El Niño on top of these 6 inches. Historically, El Niño can raise water levels along the West Coast by an additional 6 to 12 inches throughout the winter, and key indicators for this season are already pointing to a supercharged El Niño.

Read the full article at the LA Times

Pacific bluefin tuna working group meeting ends without recommendations

July 14, 2026 — A working group of nations that commercially harvest Pacific bluefin tuna concluded its July meeting without agreeing on new management measures to be implemented in 2027.

“For much of the last decade, Pacific bluefin management showed that when governments work together, they can bring a severely overfished species back from the brink of collapse. But at a joint management meeting in Nagasaki, Japan, governments disregarded a tentative agreement they made in March to adopt a much-needed management procedure for the species at this convening,” Dave Gershman, who heads up The Pew Charitable Trusts’ conservation work with Pacific RMFOs, said in a release

Read the full article at SeafoodSource