Ocean Heat Wiped Out Half These Seabirds Around Alaska

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By Catrin Einhorn, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: The first evidence was the feathered bodies washing up on Alaskan beaches. They were common murres, sleek black-and-white seabirds that typically spend months at a time away from land. But in 2015 and 2016, officials tallied 62,000 emaciated corpses from California to Alaska. Since then, scientists have been piecing together what happened to the birds, along with other species in the northeast Pacific that suddenly died or disappeared. It became clear that the culprit was an record-breaking marine heat wave, a mass of warm water that would come to be known as the Blob. New findings on its effect on murres, published on Thursday in the journal Science, are a stark sign of the perils facing ecosystems in a warming world.... 

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