The Blobs: Fantasy vs. Fact

Jul 5, 2024 | Climate Change, Environment, Fish & Fishing, Marine science, Nature, Ocean Life, Oceans

In The Blob, a 1958 horror movie, a gelatinous people-eating alien terrified a small town as it devoured residents and grew bigger, redder and more voracious. The film became a drive-in favorite and a sci-fi cult classic.

More than half a century later the entire West Coast of North America faced a very real and even more dangerous Blob. In the winter of 2013/2014  a “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge” of high pressure, as meteorologists described it, clamped over the north Pacific like a lid, stalling winds and blocking storms.  Warmer-than-normal waters spread,  eventually covering about 3.5 million square miles from Alaska to Mexico—an area larger than the contiguous United States.

Nick Bond, a University of Washington climatologist, dubbed this marine anomaly “The Blob.” The squishy, unscientific name stuck as The Blob lived up to the tag lines for the film that shared its name: “Indescribable!” “Indestructible!” “Nothing can stop it!”  Years later Bond reflected on his legacy:  “I came up with a four-letter word for an ocean phenomenon.”

Persisting for season after season, The Blob, as one headline declared, “cooked the Pacific.”  In some places sea temperatures rose seven degrees Fahrenheit above average and extended to depths of 1,300 feet. The heat killed phytoplankton, the minuscule plants that make up the base of the ocean’s food chain. The tiny animals that feed on them, such as krill, herring and sardines, starved.  Losing the mainstay of their diet, larger fish declined or died off.  Some marine species changed their migration routes and breeding times. Giant squid, sunburst sea anemones and dozens of others  swam farther north than they had ever ventured.

Whales, hunting closer to shore, suffered more ship strikes and entanglements in fishing lines.  Sea lion pups, stranded as their mothers searched for food, wasted away.  The emaciated bodies of seabirds, including Cassin’s auklets in Oregon and common murres in California, washed up like empty plastic bottles on Pacific shores.

In 2015 a bloom of toxic algae—one of the largest, longest-lasting ever reported—devastated marine species and forced the closure of major fisheries. In 2016 an El Niño so powerful that it earned the nickname “Godzilla” pulsed more warm water north from the equator.

The cinematic Blob proved easier to contain.  Townspeople, figuring out that the monster shriveled in  cold temperatures, attacked it with carbon dioxide fire extinguishers. Parachutes lowered the frozen remnants of the Blob onto an Arctic ice field. But some locals worried:  What if the ocean warmed  and thawed the Blob? Would it return? Audiences saw the words “The End” morph into an ominous floating question mark. In fact, The Blob did come back—in a sequel in 1972 and a remake in 1988. Another reboot, in development for years,  may go into production soon.

Back in the real world, winter storms cooled much of the North Pacific in late 2016,  but “a lingering hangover from the Blob,” in Bond’s words, persists. Residual heat deep in the ocean has given rise to huge areas of unusually warm water, now classified as “marine heat waves.”

None has matched the enormity of the original Blob, but they continue to disrupt marine environments and imperil ocean denizens. As scientists monitor and analyze the impact of warming seas, they look back at the 2014 Blob as “a wake-up call for us all that we need to prepare ourselves for the unexpected.”

This may be the scariest scenario of all.

Dianne Hales, a New York Times best-selling author, serves as a docent and research volunteer at the University of California, Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory and Reserve; a tide pool guide for the Stewards of the Coast and Redwoods; and a monitor for the Seabird Protection Network.

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