Deadly Algae Are Creeping Northward
Updated at 12:58 p.m. ET on November 1, 2019.
In the late winter of 2015, more than 1 million common murres—prim, black-and-white seabirds—died off the shores of Alaska. They’d been washing up all along the Pacific Coast that winter, as far south as California. But in Alaska, the die-off took over our lives, dominating the front pages of our newspapers, our back-and-forths on social media, our conversations at school pickup.
Where I live, in Homer, about 200 miles south of Anchorage, the dead birds checkerboarded the beaches so completely you could walk the wrack line on their backs. Bald eagles dismantled the carcasses in backyards and parking lots. I edged along the shoreline in wonder and horror. My daughters, 3 and 6 at the time, picked up the still-whole bodies and cradled them like dolls.
Murres are tenacious hunters, diving up to 600 feet underwater to catch fish. But these birds had starved to death, researchers concluded, likely because the so-called Warm Blob, a pool of water in the North Pacific that was strikingly warmer than normal, had made it impossible for them to find enough food. No one could say why.
I couldn’t drop it. I wanted to know exactly what was happening to the birds. In the years since, there have been other inexplicable die-offs of sea life—thousands of puffins wrecked on the Pribilof Islands, 100 million Pacific cod vanished from the Gulf of Alaska, dozens of walrus washed ashore on the state’s northwest coast, and more than 200 gray whales marooned on beaches between Mexico and Alaska. If we didn’t know what caused these phenomena, I thought, weren’t we doomed to just sit back and watch as they happened again and again and again?
So I ended up traveling to the remote Popof Island, in far western Alaska, with a scientist named Bruce Wright. Wright feels certain that he knows why the murres died. He blames a type of microscopic algae that floats in every ocean on Earth.
The skies around Anchorage were smoky when Wright and I took off aboard a 45-seat propeller plane. Alaska is warming at twice the global average, but spring and summer this year were particularly sweltering—by northern standards at least. Temperatures around the state shot up to 41 degrees higher than normal, and the heat stoked wildfires across the state. Ocean and river temperatures soared too. As my daughters and I basked in the surprisingly balmy waters in our bay, salmon floated dead on the surface of the Kuskokwim River up north, likely victims of heart attacks brought on by the heat.
The warm water also created perfect conditions for toxic algae to bloom. By
