The Big Wobble - the world is in dire trouble

Photo University of Washington 
2015 and 2016 were the two hottest years ever recorded; we should not be surprised therefore to find our oceans to be showing signs of stress as the delicate balanced eco system is also being stretched to its limit.
A deadly patch of warm water along the American West coast called the ‘Pacific blob’, stretching all the way from California up to the Gulf of Alaska, Has killed thousands of California sea lions in 2015. Many starved as they struggled to find food in an unusually warm eastern Pacific. Strange exotic tropical fish have been reported off the coast of Alaska. In the winter of 2015 blue-footed diving seabirds called Cassin’s auklets, have been washing up dead by the thousands on beaches from San Francisco to Alaska, it is thought more than 250,000 died from lack of food. An unprecedented die off  which began in 2011 along the West coast of North America when billions of sea urchins and sea stars died suddenly in what was 'one of the most unusual and dramatic die-offs marine biologists have ever recorded.'
The Culprit: Warm Water?
Bill Sydeman, a senior scientist at California's Farallon Institute, said he believes the most likely scenario is that the deaths are related to a massive blob of warm water that heated the North Pacific last year and contributed to California's drought and to 2016 being the hottest year on record.
That water was hotter and stayed warm longer than at any time since record-keeping began. It stretched across the Gulf of Alaska, where a high-pressure system blocked storms, preventing the water from churning to the surface and mixing with air. More warm water eventually moved inward along the coast as far south as California, altering how favorable the environment was for the zooplankton that many fish and birds, including Cassin's auklets, feed on.
Last year tens of thousands of common murres were the victims, an abundant North Pacific seabird, starved and washed ashore on beaches from California to Alaska, researchers have pinned the cause to unusually warm ocean temperatures that affected the tiny fish they eat.
A year after tens of thousands of the common murres died, John Piatt, a research wildlife biologist for the U.S. Geological Survey claims the deaths of the common murres is an indicator of the regions' health.
Elevated temperatures in seawater affected wildlife in a pair of major marine ecosystems along the West Coast and Canada, said
"If tens of thousands of them are dying, it's because there's no fish out there, anywhere, over a very large area," Piatt said.

It is thought 500,000 of the common murres, who look like thin penguins, died last year all though this could be just a conservative guess because only a fraction of the dead birds likely reached the shore.
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Photo Sacramento Bee
Sent in by Chessie Crowe Gartmayer

• Ecological threats loom amid rising Calif. reservoir, damaged spillway at tallest US dam
  
• The higher flows of water have further eroded the gated spillway channel
  
• The worst case would be if the emergency spillway (which was built in the 1960s and has never been used) starts to erode - potentially leading to the formation of a deeper channel allowing for a rapid uncontrolled outflow from the dam.
  

Only just over a month ago California was at the back-end of a miserable 5 year drought, just 40 odd days later empty reservoirs are overflowing emergency spillway’s leaving residents and water authorities very worried.
The Oroville Dam California’s second-largest reservoir has for the first time since it was completed in 1968, begun spewing water from its storm-swollen reservoir overtopping the emergency spillway Saturday, sending sheets of water down a forested hillside and adding to the murk and debris churning in the Feather River below. The emergency releases underscored the perilous situation confronting the operators of California’s second-largest reservoir for the rest of this extraordinarily rainy winter.



Photo RT.com
Unable to release enough water from the dam’s 3,000-foot main spillway, which split open Tuesday and continues to erode, the California Department of Water Resources announced that storm waters reached the top of the dam at around 8 a.m. Saturday and began flowing over the concrete lip of the adjacent emergency spillway onto a wooded ravine below reports the Sacramento Bee.
The flow began as a steady, smooth spill across the 1,700-foot-wide lip of the emergency structure, and was expected to peak at 6,000 to 12,000 cubic feet of water per second at around midnight Saturday. With dry weather in the near-term forecast for the Sierra and inflows to the reservoir slowing, the lake level should fall below the emergency spillway as of Monday night, said Doug Carlson, a DWR spokesman.


Photo Metabunk
But the crisis at Lake Oroville won’t abate any time soon. Northern California is on pace for its wettest winter ever, and Croyle said an estimated 2.8 million acre-feet of snow blankets the Sierra above the dam. Depending on how quickly that melts, it will put additional strain on Oroville Dam in the months to come.
“Our next 60 to 90 days will be critical, how we route this (snow) runoff through this reservoir,” Croyle said. “There’s a lot of snow up there.”
At various vista points in Oroville, a community of 15,000 just downstream of the dam, residents gathered under clear skies to gape in awe at the Feather River, so infused with mud and debris it resembled liquid clay as it tore through its channel.
Longtime resident Tom Oxford, 55, took in the view from a residential ridge on Mira Loma Drive, where the river surged beneath a railroad trestle. He took note that the trestle and levees on both sides were holding, with heavy moss rock that had been there for decades undisturbed by the fast-moving water.

Still, the sight was piercing. “We’ve never seen the river that brown before,” Oxford said, “and I’ve been here 50 years.” 



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Photo ABC
An absolute disaster has struck New Zealand after around 400 whales were found thrashing tales in distress and stranded on a beach on Thursday causing the death of around 300 whales, the situation worsened this morning when another 240 arrived in the same place causing more chaos for the many volunteers trying desperately to refloat the desperate whales. Earlier on Saturday, volunteers had refloated some 100 of the more than 400 pilot whales which beached on Thursday.
But a human chain, with volunteers wading neck-deep into the water, failed to prevent a fresh pod making landfall.



Photo Los Angeles Times
The stranding now involving around 640 whales is thought to be one of the worst ever in the world.
More than 300 of the 400 original arrivals died while medics and members of the public tried to keep survivors alive by cooling them with water.
It is hoped that those of the new arrivals that survive can be moved back out to sea during the next high tide in daylight on Sunday.
It is not clear why the whales continue to arrive on the 5km-long (three miles-long) beach next to Golden Bay.
One theory is that they may have been driven on to land by sharks, after bite marks were found on one of the dead whales.



Photo Gizmodo
Herb Christophers of New Zealand's department of conservation told the BBC that the whales were trying to get round the top of South Island, but if their navigation went wrong they ended up on the beach.
In the shallower waters, the animals' use of echolocation was impaired.

"It's a very difficult place if you get lost in there and you are a whale," he said.


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Dead cattle litter the ground in drought ridden Ethiopia Photo Orthodox Christian Network
Kenya's president has declared the drought, which has affected as much as half the country, a national disaster.
Uhuru Kenyatta appealed for international aid and said the government would increase food handouts to the most needy communities.
Kenya's Red Cross says 2.7 million people face starvation if more help is not provided.
Other countries in the region have also been hit by the drought, blamed on last year's El Nino weather phenomenon.
In Somalia, nearly half the population, over 5 million, is suffering from food shortages and the UN says there is a risk of famine in several parts of the country.
During the last drought on this scale in 2011, famine killed about 250,000 Somalis.
In a statement, Mr Kenyatta said the government had allocated $105m to tackle the drought which has affected people, livestock and wildlife in 23 of Kenya's 47 counties.
"Support from our partners would complement government's efforts in mitigating the effects of drought," he said.
Mr Kenyatta added that all purchases of food and other items would be made in a transparent way.
"I will not tolerate anybody who would try to take advantage of this situation to defraud public funds," the president said.
An El Nino weather pattern, which ended in May, triggered drought conditions across the southern and eastern African region that hit the staple, maize, and other crops and dented economic growth.
More than 1 million people in drought-hit southern Madagascar are experiencing "alarming" levels of hunger, and more aid is needed to prevent a dire situation from becoming a "catastrophe", UN agencies said on Thursday.
This is the latest warning by the agencies who have been scaling up their response to a crisis affecting more than half the population in the south of the island nation.
Some 20% of households in the affected areas are now experiencing emergency levels of hunger, according to the latest food survey.
Meanwhile as South Africa contends with a severe drought, officials at Kruger National Park have put a plan into action that they say will help avert mass die-offs of wildlife-through the selective culling of some of the park's largest grazers.
This week, rangers began killing around 350 of the park's 7,500 hippos and 47,000 buffalo.
The populations of both species are at their highest ever, according to officials.
Reducing their numbers will not put either species at risk, rangers say, but will reduce some of the strain on the park's grasslands and water holes.
Zimbabwe is one of many countries feeling the strain of El Nino, which has dried up rainfall across southern Africa over the last year, killing crops, disrupting hydropower production and forcing local water authorities to enforce stringent water rationing in some areas.
More than 5 million people are facing food and water shortages.
Livestock experts say parched pastures are causing the deaths of thousands of cattle across the country.
Last year, the agriculture ministry’s livestock department estimated that the national cattle herd stood at 5,3 million animals, down from over 6 million in 2014.
In one district in Masvingo province last year, more than a thousand cattle died because of drought, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.