{"id":5566,"date":"2024-01-22T17:35:52","date_gmt":"2024-01-23T00:35:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/?p=5566"},"modified":"2024-01-22T17:35:52","modified_gmt":"2024-01-23T00:35:52","slug":"oceanographic-alchemy-how-winds-become-whale-food-in-oregon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/2024\/01\/22\/oceanographic-alchemy-how-winds-become-whale-food-in-oregon\/","title":{"rendered":"Oceanographic Alchemy: How Winds Become Whale Food in Oregon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By\u00a0<\/em>Rachel Kaplan<\/em><\/a>, PhD student, Oregon State University College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences,\u00a0<\/em>Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Lab<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here in the GEMM lab, we love the Oregon coast for its amazing animals \u2013 the whales we all study, the seabirds we can sometimes spot from the lab, and the critters that come up in net tows when we\u2019re out on the water. Oregonians owe the amazing biological productivity of the Oregon coast to the underlying atmospheric and oceanographic processes, which make our local Northern California Current (NCC) ecosystem one of the most productive places on earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the topographical bumps of the Oregon coastline and vagaries of coastal weather do have a big impact on the physical and biological processes off the coast, the dominant forces shaping the NCC are large-scale, atmospheric heavy hitters. As the northeasterly trade winds blow across the globe, they set up the clockwise-rotating North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a major feature covering about 20 million square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean. The equatorward-flowing part of the gyre is the California Current. It comprises an Eastern Boundary Upwelling Ecosystem, one of four such global systems that, while occupying only 1% of the global ocean, are responsible for a whopping 11% of its total primary productivity, and 17% of global fish catch.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Figure 1.<\/em> Important features of the California Current System (Checkley and Barth, 2009).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

At its core, this incredible ocean productivity is due to atmospheric pressure gradients. Every spring, an atmospheric system called the North Pacific High strengthens, loosening the hold of the stormy Aleutian Low. As a result, the winds begin to blow from the north, pushing the surface water in the NCC with them towards the equator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This water is subject to the Coriolis effect \u2013 an inertial force that acts upon objects moving across a rotating frame of reference, and the same force that airplane pilots must account for in their flight trajectories. As friction transmits the stress of wind acting upon the ocean\u2019s surface downward through the water column, the Coriolis effect deflects deeper layers of water successively further to the right, before the original wind stress finally peters out due to frictional losses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This process creates an oceanographic feature called an Ekman spiral, and its net effect in the NCC is the offshore transport of surface water. Deep water flows up to replace it, bringing along nutrients that feed the photosynthesizers at the base of the food web. Upwelling ecosystems like the NCC tend to be dominated by food webs full of large organisms, in which energy flows from single-celled phytoplankton like diatoms, to grazers like copepods and krill, to predators like fish, seabirds, and our favorite, whales. These bountiful food webs keep us busy: GEMM Lab research has explored how upwelling dynamics impact gray whale prey<\/a> off the Oregon coast, as well as parallel questions far from home about blue whale prey in New Zealand<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Figure 2. The Coriolis effect creates an oceanographic feature called an Ekman Spiral, resulting in water transport perpendicular to the wind direction (Source: <\/em>NOAA<\/em><\/a>).<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Although the process of upwelling lies at the heart of the productive NCC ecosystem, it isn\u2019t enough for it to simply happen \u2013 timing matters, too. The seasonality of ecological events, or phenology, can have dramatic consequences for the food web, and individual populations in it. When upwelling is initiated as normal by the \u201cspring transition\u201d, the delivery of freshly upwelled nutrients activates the food web, with reverberations all the way from phytoplankton to predators. When the spring transition is late, however, the surface ocean is warm, nutrients are depleted, primary productivity is low, and the life cycles and abundances of some species can change dramatically. In 2005, for example, the spring transition was delayed by a month, resulting in declines and spatial redistributions of the taxa typically found in the NCC, including hake, rockfish, albacore tuna, and squid. The Cassin\u2019s auklet, which feeds on plankton, suffered its worst year on record, including reproductive failure that may have resulted from a lack of food.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Upwelling is alchemical in its power to transform, modulating physical and atmospheric processes and turning them into ecosystem gold \u2013 or trouble. As oceanographers and Oregonians alike wonder how climate change may reshape our coast, changes to upwelling will likely play a big role in determining the outcome. Some expect that upwelling-favorable winds will become more prevalent, potentially increasing primary productivity. Others suspect that the timing of upwelling will shift, and ecological mismatches like those that occurred in 2005 will be increasingly detrimental to the NCC ecosystem. Whatever the outcome, upwelling is inherent to the character of the Oregon coast, and will help shape its future.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Figure 3. <\/em>The GEMM Lab is grateful that the biological productivity generated by upwelling draws humpback whales like this one to the Oregon coast! (photo: Dawn Barlow)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n

By\u00a0Rachel Kaplan, PhD student, Oregon State University College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences,\u00a0Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Lab Here in the GEMM lab, we love the Oregon coast for its amazing animals \u2013 the whales we all study, the seabirds we can sometimes spot from the … Continue reading Oceanographic Alchemy: How Winds Become Whale Food in Oregon<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10751,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[188686,1310535],"tags":[635445,634945,513,799,148762,1310687,360],"class_list":["post-5566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-projects","category-oregon-whale-distribution","tag-gemm-lab","tag-gray-whales","tag-marine-mammals","tag-oceanography","tag-oregon-coast","tag-rachel-kaplan","tag-upwelling"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10751"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5566"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5572,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5566\/revisions\/5572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}