Alaska Business April 2022

E N V I R O N M E N TA L

Chasing ‘The Blob’

The aftermath of a marine eco-monster By Isaac Stone Simonelli

T

he 1958 creature feature The Blob ends (spoiler alert for a movie older than Alaska statehood) with the titular monster frozen in its slimy tracks and airlifted to the North Pole, not dead but at least defeated. “As long as the Arctic stays cold,” quips Steve McQueen’s character. Well, about that…. A blob menaced the Gulf of Alaska in recent years, and the marine ecosystem has yet to fully recover. The Blob is what researchers called the warm water anomaly that persisted in the region from 2014 to 2016. The event was followed by several smaller warm water anomalies in subsequent years. While some elements of the ecosystem have returned to pre-Blob levels, marine heatwaves that triggered the event are expected to increase in severity, duration, and frequency, with unknown consequences for the North Pacific food web and Alaska fisheries. The Blob was tied to huge seabird die-offs, whale mortality events, and declines in fish populations, such as Pacific cod and Chinook salmon, explains Rob Suryan, the Recruitment,

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Energetics, and Coastal Assessment Program Manager at NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center. “The Gulf seems to be in an alternative state at this point,” Suryan says. “It hasn’t fully recovered to preheatwave conditions, and it’s not in what we’ve seen in prior conditions, but that doesn’t say it still won’t.” Because the Gulf of Alaska is an enormous region—591,900 square surface miles—the metrics of recovery look very different at the Western Gulf near the Alaska Peninsula, across to Cook Inlet, Prince William Sound, and even Southeast Alaska. “There are some examples where physical and biological metrics have returned back to baseline, but there are others that have not,” Suryan says. The waters around the Kenai Peninsula, stretching to the Copper River Delta, continue to suffer from a more sustained impact from The Blob than much of the rest of the region.

“The heatwave was very unique, at least in our hindcast, in the sense that it was a multi-year event in which many organisms were affected by warm temperatures,” says Russell Hopcroft, chair of the Department of Oceanography at UAF. “And it was not just the summers; these were temperatures that stayed persistent in the system even during the winters.”

A Simmering Stew Whether or not marine heatwaves are good or bad is all about perspective and colored by cultural, economic, and societal values, explains Hopcroft. “You’re going to see winners and losers as the climate changes,” Hopcroft says. “Some species lose and

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