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babylonsister

(171,035 posts) Tue May 15, 2018, 03:56 PM May 2018

Pierce: The Great Climate Hoax Is Putting Fish in the Wrong Places

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a20703730/fish-arctic-atlantification-pacification/

The Great Climate Hoax Is Putting Fish in the Wrong Places

Surely, this will end well.
By Charles P. Pierce
May 15, 2018

I don’t want to unduly alarm people, but there are lots of fish in the wrong places these days. This, of course, is connected to the effects of the Great Chinese Climate Hoax. Suitable environments are moving, and the fish are moving with them. The Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies has been tracking this phenomenon. Central to it is the simple fact that the Arctic is getting warmer and the Arctic Ocean is becoming Atlanticized, where it is not being Pacificized.

As the Arctic heats up faster than any other region on the planet, once-distinct boundaries between the frigid polar ocean and its warmer, neighboring oceans are beginning to blur, opening the gates to southern waters bearing foreign species, from phytoplankton to whales. The “Atlantification” and “Pacification” of the Arctic Ocean are now rapidly advancing. A new paper by University of Washington oceanographer Rebecca Woodgate, for example, finds that the volume of Pacific Ocean water flowing north into the Arctic Ocean through the Bering Strait surged up to 70 percent over the past decade and now equals 50 times the annual flow of the Mississippi River. And over on the Atlantic flank of the Arctic, another recent report concludes that the Arctic Ocean’s cold layering system that blocks Atlantic inflows is breaking down, allowing a deluge of warmer, denser water to flood into the Arctic Basin.

Entire ecosystems are moving north, to the disadvantage of ecosystems that had existed there for eons.

Signs of ecosystem shifts are even more dramatic on the Atlantic side of the Arctic, where Atlantic Ocean inflows overall are far warmer, larger, and saltier. Moore likens the incursion across the long boundary zone above Iceland and Scandinavia to a “firehose,” compared to a “garden hose” on the Pacific side, where incoming waters are constrained by the relatively narrow Bering Strait. “When I came to Norway in 1974, the northern border for mackerel was western Norway,” says Paul Wassmann, a professor of marine ecology at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø and an expert on ice-edge ecosystems. “Now you can see [mackerel] in Svalbard fjords,” he says, referring to a group of Norwegian Arctic islands that lie nearly 600 miles above the mainland as far as 81 degrees North. Buoyed by Atlantic intrusions, warm water species are spreading northeast into the Arctic Ocean, and resident cold–adapted species, such as Arctic cod, are attempting to retreat further north. In the past half-decade, says Wassmann, “There has been (Atlantic) cod in fishable amounts north of Svalbard, which had not been observed before.”

Nobody knows ultimately what this will mean, but the forces driving the change show no indication of slackening. Things in the wrong places is going to become the new normal.