On March 31, 2021, an adult female gray whale carcass was found ashore in Chrisfield, San Francisco, on April 3, a female gray whale carcass was washed ashore at Moss Beach in San Mateo County, on April 6, a semi-adult male gray whale carcass was found floating near Berkeley Pier and had to be towed away by tugboat, and on April 7, an adult female gray whale carcass was found at Muir Beach.
In just eight days, four gray whale carcasses were found one after another, except for one gray whale that was discovered by scientists at MMC (Marine Mammal Center) to have died from a ship strike, and the cause of death of several other gray whales is unknown! An eerie atmosphere hung over the West Coast of the United States!
On April 6, a 37-foot (11.3 m) adult male gray whale was spotted floating at Berkeley Pier.
What disaster is hidden behind the mass death of gray whales?
"At first, no one cared about this disaster, it was just a wildfire, a drought, the extinction of a species, the disappearance of a city, until this disaster was relevant to everyone."
The mass deaths of gray whales are not the first, and the Associated Press reported on January 21, 2019, that at least 81 gray whale carcasses have been washed ashore in California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska since January 1, and if you add Mexico and Canada, the total number of gray whale deaths has exceeded 160.
Gray whales are not very large among cetaceans, up to 16 meters long, weigh nearly 40 tons, generally live up to 50 to 60 years, and travel between feeding and breeding areas every year, and there are currently two major populations in the Pacific Ocean, a small group of 300 heads between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan, and the other between Alaska and Baja California.
The waters off California are the traditional breeding grounds for gray whales, but after they were discovered by humans in 1857, they were almost exterminated, but after they began to be legislated by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1949, the number began to recover, and by early 2016, the number of gray whales migrating along the west coast of the Americas had returned to about 27,000.
But since then, UME events (unnatural deaths of marine mammals) have continued to occur, and statistics to date have found at least 378 deaths, and scientists at NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) have stepped in to investigate the unnatural deaths of gray whales and found that the causes of death are more complex, for the following reasons:
1, ship impact death, accounting for a very small proportion
2, abnormal weight loss, whale fat thickness is not enough
3. Other cases of unexplained deaths
The second case is exactly what scientists are concerned about, the gray whale is a baleen whale, they mainly prey on plankton such as krill and other crustaceans and footed animals, the cause of abnormal wasting from malnutrition, that is, not enough food to support their consumption during the long migration process, and eventually lost control in the ocean and washed up on the beach to run aground and die.
Dr Fredrik Christiansen of Aarhus University in Denmark said that they have been monitoring the weight and fat content of whales with drones by taking images when they surface to breathe, and researchers then assess the physical health of whales based on the images, and found that the health of whales has deteriorated since the earliest 2017:
Gray whales gradually became thinner
Christiansen cites the Bering Sea's food supply as the culprit, which could be due to two scenarios: the impact of increased whale populations on food competition and the rapid climate change in the Arctic. Dr. For the former, Dr. Explanation says that gray whales used to be much higher in numbers than they are now, so the latter is the biggest source of the problem.
Arctic waters have warmed more than three times the global average in recent years, and sea ice areas have reached new lows every autumn, which greatly affects climate patterns and the activity of plankton located at the bottom of the food chain, which are already threatened by abnormally elevated water temperatures.
Gray whale death site
According to a 2020 report by noAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), the original productivity of plankton in the Bering Sea in 2020 was significantly below average. Surprisingly, most of the areas surveyed are on the rise, for example, while primary productivity has increased in most Arctic regions (such as Greenland), the Bering Sea has largely flattened out and is declining!
Although neither NOAA nor the scientific community can determine the direct relationship between the two, researchers are very concerned about global warming, and the challenges for gray whales and other marine mammals are increasing year on year as warming intensifies.
Further reading: When was the Arctic ice-free?
According to data released by the National Ice and Snow Data Center (NSIDC), the Arctic sea ice area in March 2021 was the ninth lowest in nearly 50 years, with an Arctic sea ice area of 14.64 million square kilometers, 790,000 square kilometers below the average from 1981 to 2010.
The loss of Arctic sea ice in March occurred mainly in the Sea of Okhotsk, the southern edge of the Bering Sea and the east of Svalbard and the northern part of the East Greenland Sea. The Arctic Shipping Lanes have been opened in summer, and ships from the Americas to Europe can reach Europe via the shortest route in the Arctic, saving a lot of fuel, but what does this mean?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="30" > Earth's ecology is approaching a tipping point</h1>
On January 13, 2021, the Woodwell Climate Research Center at the University of Northern Arizona published a paper in Science Advances arguing that at the current rate of warming, the Earth will reach a climatic tipping point in the next 20-30 years!
The team counted more than 20 years of data from the world's major biomes and found that as temperatures rise, plants' ability to absorb carbon dioxide will be halved (1/3 of global carbon dioxide emissions are currently absorbed by plants), which is the temperature tipping point where plants appear in global warming, and the efficiency of carbon uptake by increasing temperature decreases.
Over the past few hundred years, plants have absorbed much more carbon dioxide than they emit, making the global carbon crisis appear later, but as temperatures continue to rise, this barely maintained state will be cliff-like out of control, and if carbon absorption is halved, global warming will far exceed IPCC's expectations, thus pushing the earth's environment into a place of doom.
Based on the model, the research team found that the world's highest carbon-rich biomes, including the tropical rainforests of the Amazon and Southeast Asia, as well as the Taiga forest (Northern Leaf Forest) in Russia and Canada, will be among the first regions to reach this tipping point, and when this tipping point comes, we really can't imagine what kind of end humanity will face.
Extended reading: How bad is the Earth's environment?
Quite a few things have happened in 2020, so let's take a brief inventory of the flow account:
January: Media reports of vegetation at a height of 6,159 meters on Everest
February: The highest temperature is 20 degrees Celsius on Seymour Island in Antarctica
March: Large patches of eerie red snow appear on the snow outside Ukraine's National Antarctic Science Center in Antarctica
April and May: These two months are more interesting, the British fever base station, Americans kneel to kill black people, and the climate has nothing to do with it, only when eating melons
June: The Russian Siberian town of Vilkhoyonsk in the Arctic Circle was measured at a temperature of 38°C, breaking the record for high temperatures in the Arctic Circle
July-August: California fires spread and cannot be extinguished
September: The World Meteorological Organization says that La Niña officially appeared at the end of 2020, but in fact it did, and it was cold and shivering
October: Polarstern returns from the Arctic, bringing bad news: the Arctic is dying, the ice sheet is the second smallest in history, the polar bear ecology has deteriorated badly, and the North Atlantic current is deeper into the farther north...
Northern hemisphere winter, unusually cold, this is due to global warming, because more powerful low-latitude warm and humid air flow will make the Arctic vortex protrude into lower latitudes, forming extreme low temperatures, 2020 winter we will enjoy, especially in texas, the United States nearly half a month of cold currents, let Americans remember vividly.
Further reading: Japan discharges nuclear wastewater
Japan will discharge 1.25 million tons of nuclear wastewater, and these dumped nuclear wastewater will cover the northwest Pacific Ocean in 57 days, reach the United States within 3 years, spread the entire Pacific Ocean back to the Western Pacific in 10 years, spread to the entire Pacific Ocean in 45 years, and spread to the whole world in the future by ocean currents!
Some people wash the ground for Japan, saying that the Pacific Ocean is so big, the emission point is fine! I ask you if your conscience doesn't hurt when you talk nonsense with your eyes open? Some netizens replied: Of course not, the conscience of the person who said this should be eaten by the dog!