Gulf of Maine’s 3rd-warmest year on record harms puffins, turtles and kelp

https://www.pressherald.com/2018/12/06/third-warmest-year-on-record-for-gulf-of-maine-harms-puffins-turtles-and-kelp/

By Colin Woodard
Dec. 6, 2018

The Gulf of Maine is experiencing its third-warmest year on record, triggering the starvation of puffin chicks off the Maine coast, mass strandings of sea turtles in Massachusetts, and heightened concerns about the survival of endangered right whales and the North Atlantic’s largest kelp forest.

Surface temperatures in 2018 are running 2.8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, a level exceeded only in 2012 and 2016 during the 37 years that satellite records of sea surface temperatures have been collected in the gulf, says Andrew Pershing, chief scientific officer at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland. Pershing tracks the data and first drew attention to the rapid warming of the gulf, which is happening faster than in any other part of the world ocean, except for a section of the Kurushio current northeast of Japan.

“This year we wound up in the absurd situation that 250 of 313 days so far have qualified as an ocean heat wave,” Pershing says. “Weird is the new normal.”

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