![]() The dead sea stars, usually the most noticeable creatures in tide pools, hit him particularly hard. “The more I walked and the more I saw, the more sobering things got,” said Dr. The scientist in him was excited, he admitted, as he saw the real effects of something he had studied for so long. When he went to the beach on one of the hottest days last week, the smell of putrefaction immediately hit him. Harley looked at the breathtaking weather forecasts, thinking of how low the tide would be at noon, and the exposed clams, starfish and barnacles were baking. ![]() A study by an international team of climate researchers found that such extremes would have been virtually impossible without global warming. ![]() Hundreds of people died last week when the heat wave parked over the Pacific Northwest. Such extreme conditions will become more common and intense, according to scientists, as climate change, fueled by humans burning fossil fuels, has devastating effects on both animals and humans. He is still investigating the damage and plans to release a number of papers. Harley calculated the death toll based on how many mussels live on a given coast, how much of the area is good habitat for mussels, and what fraction of the mussels he observed died. “It just feels like one of those post-apocalyptic films,” says Christopher Harley, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia who studies the effects of climate change on coastal marine ecosystems. The combination of exceptional heat and drought that hit the western United States and Canada in the past two weeks has killed hundreds of millions of marine animals and continues to threaten countless freshwater species, according to a preliminary estimate and interviews with scientists. Sockeye salmon swam lazily in an overheated Idaho river, which resulted in wildlife officials moving them to cooler areas. Dead clams and clams covered rocks in the Pacific Northwest, their shells gaping open as if they had been cooked.
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