June 12, 2024 — About half of the water near the seafloor off the Pacific Northwest coast experienced low-oxygen conditions in 2021, according to a new study.
And those hypoxic conditions, which are expected to become common with global warming, threaten the food web, the study found.
The study from Oregon State University, published in Nature Scientific Reports, used data from 2021 to map out oxygen levels across the bottom 32 feet of the Pacific Northwest continental shelf.
The research illuminates how the planet’s warming has fundamentally changed the ocean’s annual cycles and ecosystems, endangering culturally and economically valuable species like the Dungeness crab, which was worth an annual average of $45 million from 2014 and 2019.