Social Econ Blog

Cape Perpetua is the highest point on the Oregon Coast. Shooting 803 feet almost straight up from the Pacific Ocean, it offers spectacular views (like the one shown below), and the 2,700 acre Cape Perpetua Scenic Area "boasts twice the botanical mass, per square acre, as the Amazon jungle in South America."


Cape Perpetua Lookout
Originally uploaded by gentlemanrook.

However, just off the coast, a 2,100 square mile area of the ocean that used to also be rich with life is now completely dead:

In years past, the reef a few miles from Oregon's Cape Perpetua was a small underwater gem. It was favored by the quillback, black and canary rockfish, which darted among boulders bedecked with sea stars and anemones.

On Tuesday, underwater video cameras remotely operated from this research vessel sent back a starkly different view — a reef barren of fish but littered with what researchers estimated as thousands of carcasses of decaying crabs.

Worms, normally dug into sea sand, drifted dead along the bottom.

"It's just a wasteland down there," said Francis Chan, an Oregon State University marine ecologist aboard the Elakha. "I didn't expect to see anything quite like this."

These crabs and worms died because they proved too slow to move away from an extraordinary swath of oxygen-depleted water.

Scientists call this a dead zone.

The cause:

The Pacific Northwest dead zone results from strong northerly winds that allow the cold water to surface without any mixer winds from the south. This produces a series of upwellings that pile too much oxygen-poor water into the coastal zone.

Researchers at OSU said the erratic wind patterns of recent years are consistent with changes predicted in computer models that attempt to simulate the effects of global warming. But they caution that at this point it is unclear what — if any — link the dead zone has to climate change.

"We can say that what we are seeing is totally consistent with the changes predicted by the models," said Jane Lubchenco, OSU marine ecologist.

Sad. Very, very sad.