Other species traditionally found only farther south could move in to take their place. Summer flounder, which fisheries managers have already detected moving northward, would likely decamp for colder currents, along with striped bass. “Probably some of those species that are in the bay currently that are more adapted to cooler water may be completely gone,” said Chris Moore, a scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. And that’s the atmosphere, that’s the ocean-atmosphere exchange of heat that would be the only possible cause of that.”Įxactly what regular extreme temperatures do to aquatic life in the Bay isn’t clear, although Mazzini and Pianca warned they could have “devastating impacts.” They determined “there had to be large-scale forcing happening that would force the ocean and the estuary at the same time. You’d need unrealistic currents that would never happen in nature,” Mazzini said. “You could never explain a heat wave occurring in the ocean and in one or two days going all the way to Baltimore. Most tellingly, the data showed that marine heat waves tended to occur around the same time all around the Chesapeake Bay. Mazzini said the pair’s “analysis suggests very strongly that the heat is coming from the atmosphere.” If trends persist, within 50 years marine heat waves could occur on a monthly basis and by the end of the century could extend to cover over half the year, leaving the Chesapeake Bay in a “semi-permanent” marine heat wave state. Between 20, maximum frequency reached six to eight annually.įurthermore, the study noted, while years without marine heat waves “were not uncommon prior to 2010,” since then they’ve been absent from the bay in only a single year: 2014. Prior to 2010, the maximum number of marine heat waves that occurred in the Chesapeake Bay annually hovered around four to five. Since roughly 2010, however, these events - defined as five or more consecutive days when water temperatures are warmer than 90 percent of records for that location on that date - have been increasing. Using three decades of temperature records from eight buoys and stations spread throughout and near the Chesapeake Bay, Mazzini and Pianca found that between 19, the bay experienced an average of two marine heat waves per year, with each lasting about 11 days.

It’s really clear when you look at the trends they are pretty alarming,” said Piero Mazzini, a physical oceanographer who with Cassia Pianca co-authored the study published earlier this month in Frontiers in Marine Science. Photo from yvonnenavalaney/.Ī study by two researchers from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science has found that the frequency of heat waves in the waters of the Chesapeake Bay is increasing, a trend connected to rising atmospheric temperatures that could have “devastating impacts to the bay ecosystem,” the scientists warn. “Marine mussels, the ones that are dying here, just like freshwater mussels, they’re filter feeders so they do clear out particles in the water and make the water a little clearer,” explained Harley, adding that mussels are in the middle of the food web.A heron is perched on a piling at sunrise on the Chesapeake Bay in Chesapeake Beach. Harley calls mussels the “poster child” indicator of the heat’s devastation to the sea, explaining that they were the most vulnerable and obvious when they died. “It’s a reminder that yes, there are very important human tolls to climate change, but the whole system around us is changing too, and we don’t know what all of the consequences of those changes are going to be.”

Coroners Service reported a total of 777 sudden deaths in the province from June 25 to July 1 - a considerably higher number than the same period last year - and officials presume heat waves to be a significant contributing factor.

Harley, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia, roughly estimates that a total of one billion animals died in the Salish Sea off the coast of Vancouver during the heat wave, but says his team is still gathering data and whatever the actual number is, it’s massive.

Heat wave killed marine wildlife masse