Guest Blob, Blob, Blob! by David Middleton
“Beware the blob”… And the children of the blob!
The Legacy of the Blob
From California to Alaska, animals born during the infamous Blob are coming of age.
Authored by
by Gloria Dickie
July 22, 2019 | 600 words, about 3 minutesIn 2013, a mass of unusually warm water appeared in the Gulf of Alaska. Over the next three years, the Blob, as it became known, spread more than 3,200 kilometers, reaching down to Mexico. This freak marine heatwave, combined with a strong El Niño, drastically affected the Pacific Ocean ecosystem killing thousands of animals and changing the distribution of species along the coast.
It’s been three years since the Blob dissipated, and researchers are taking stock of its long-term impacts on fish and other wildlife.
Last month, Laurie Weitkamp, a fisheries biologist with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, and her colleagues released a report detailing how the Blob affected species found in the northern California Current ecosystem, which runs from the Canadian border to southern Oregon. The report shows that the mass of warm water helped some and hurt others. Between 2013 and 2017, for instance, the populations of animals accustomed to warm water, such as mackerel, squid, hake, and rockfish, ballooned. Many jellyfish species also had a strong showing.
[…]
It’s unclear how long the consequences of the Blob might last or when the next Blob might hit.
Read the other 412 words here.
Too fracking funny! The YouTube video had a disclaimer!
El Nino changes the nutrients available to fish. link Did The Blob also affect nutrients? In other words, were there effects besides just temperature?
Not sure what the point is. The Blob was an interesting phenomena similar to the Super El Nino of 1998 in that neither event had been seen before in the modern satellite monitoring era. Certainly, both were well deserving of intense study, for their unique nature if nothing else. Even more, The Blob had a major impact in fisheries, so the fishery people have good reason to pay attention as well.
As far as it’s name goes, The Blob got it’s name way back in 2015, or even earlier, so there is no news there. We always appreciated that the oceanographers who gave The Blob its moniker had a sense of humor about them. To be sure, the movie starring Steve McQueen was one of the greats in early Sci-Fi/Horror and lives on as a cult classic. Certainly there is every reason to continue to refer to the phenomena by the name it has become known as.
To be sure, nobody has mocked the Super El Nino of 1998 by making some obtuse reference to Superman movies.
Indeed, many of us like to refer to the Environmental/Green movement as The Blob, inspired by the movie. The image of a mindless mass consuming everything in it’s path is just too compelling.
Neither was I… but the article was just screaming to have the opening and ending credits of The Blob tacked onto it.
The YouTube disclaimer was unexpected lagniappe.
Get the CO2 extinguishers from the High School
CO2 It’s cold
If I remember correctly the movie was filmed in Abbeville, Louisiana, which may be why it has rained there so much since them. Who knows, may have been inspired by black blobs.
There is a paper from the fifties in a US Fishery Bulletin about warm water showing up in New England. Can’t find the reference handy, but they had T data from New Haven, Conn., back to about1780. Pesky southern species showed up in 1930s.
“Between 2013 and 2017, for instance, the populations of animals accustomed to warm water, such as mackerel, squid, hake, and rockfish, ballooned. Many jellyfish species also had a strong showing. “
Surprise for the scientists — FISH ARE MOBILE!
Yes scientist are coming to terms with the discovery that fish are quite mobile and can sort move, or more scientifically can swim in water. Oddly these fish tend to swim to locations where food, temperature, and low predation levels tend to enhance their abilities to survive.
Head of research for Northwest Fishing for Funds Science Center, Professor Daerwin (Phd Social Drinking), slurred “Hic! Fish can swim — who knew?”
🙂
Does children of the blob really refer to the children born during the blob who are just starting school, and the ones who were at school and being “educated” about the evils of mankind and the GND?
What is going to be their impact on society?
StephenP:
Yes. This was my take on this for we now have a generation which has been starved of good quality intellectual input due to the Green Blob.
Seems we are stuck with it now.
No, due to the parents of the children who were too lazy to protect their kids. Had they cared at all, they would have protected their offspring. Instead, they lazily and obediently handed them over to the Green Blob to be devoured by it.
(Telling me they only did what they thought was best? So do the parents in North Korea, so you approve of their teaching their kids to kiss Little Kim’s ring and bow to the dictator, right???? You can’t fix stupid.)
Who is we? I can swim.
The Blob is more like a multi-headed hydra…it is now protesting against the telescopes at Mauna Kea because the gods are angry at cosmologists using the sacred mountain. I’d have thought the gods would be happy to commune with astronomers more than most people, but what do I know?
Perhaps they are angry, either my tablet or the ether ate my first attempt to post this…
“…helped some and hurt others”.
Well, imagine my surprise! And how much do we pay Miss Dickie?
The GreenBlob is stupid, mindless. Like the blob in the movie, it runs on instinctual one-mindedness. It frequently turns on its own in mindless purification of perceived apostates.
The GreenSlime is far more dangerous. It thinks. It plans. It coordinates multiple propaganda campaigns. It leaves a green slime trail of money as it crawls along. A slime trail that feeds thousands of politicians from Sacramento to DC. It’s one purpose though is to promote “green energy” and simultaneously have its feeders attack fossil fuels in order to gain more wealth, a continuing cycle of more power and money. A wealth to be extracted from the middle class.
Funny the “Blob” movie is brought up — it was just shown on cable TV. I watched it — really bad. But one thing I thought I remembered from half a century ago was the “blob” coming out of the bowling lanes in a bowling alley, and it didn’t show that scene (it did show it coming out into a movie theater). Maybe the bowling alley scene was just shown in an advertisement/trailer or from my faulty memory…..
Yeah, coming out of the projection room slots. What is this, 60 years later, and I still remember?
One thing about the Blob has been useful in my life: applying it to traffic. Traffic is The Blob. Perpetually probing for openings, then oozing out. Then balancing flow.
Something similar occurred some twenty years ago off of the Grand Banks off of Newfoundland.
The cod fishery declined and the hue and cry was that the region had been over fished.
All kinds of recriminations and remedies.
Later it came out that the ocean temperature had increased and the cod went to wherever the cold water was. Then the temps started to return to normal, the cod count began to increase.
With the “Blob”, perhaps it is not a breeding increase in population, but more of an ordinary population just moving north?
I’ve been harping on the replacement of the Hot Blob with continent-sized Cold Blobs in both hemispheres and the likely confounding of usual Enso weather effects like the fizzled El Nino of 2019. The cold water is invading the equatorial band from these blobs rather than the simple upwelling only in the eastern Pacific. Watch for the flip to a long odd La Nina.
And here’s the primo child of the blob in the spotlight again:
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/jul/21/great-thunberg-you-ask-the-questions-see-us-as-a-threat?utm_source=pocket-newtab
The infection continues.
The Blob was a nail and The Enviros got their Climate hammer out, secured their government funding and PRESTO yielded the data that government demanded of them. Bravo
The Blob was essentially a persistent high-pressure system that sat over the same stretch of ocean for an extended period of time. As a result, the temperatures underneath the high-pressure system got very warm, just like what happens over land when a heat wave occurs, and this high-pressure system warmed the ocean water.
The warm water was measured to be only a few meters deep, which rules out underwater volcanism as the source of the Blob.
high pressure = fewer clouds = sunlight enters water = water warms
Heresy
Hear Say
There is a nice analogue of the Jan-Feb 2014 weather patterns which were highly influenced by the Northeast Pacific warm blob, in Dec 1876 and Jan 1877. The Northeast US had a very cold two months, and the UK had very similar wet stormy and mild conditions, with marginally more rainfall for England and Wales. It was followed by the Super El Nino of 1877-78.
https://craigm350.wordpress.com/2014/03/18/the-great-global-weirding-of-18767/