SEAFOODNEWS.COM [SeafoodNews] April 5, 2016
(Goddard Space Flight Center - click for larger image)
A new NASA study documents the current El Nino impact on the marine food chain, hoping to show where recovery may begin this spring. The preliminary conclusions are that a recovery from El Nino is underway and that in Chile and Peru, impacts were less devastating than the 1998 super El Nino.
An El Nino, in which masses of warm tropical water slosh eastward to the coast of South America, has a huge impact on primary marine production, which NASA scientists are currently studying.
El Nino's mass of warm water puts a lid on the normal currents of cold, deep water that typically rise to the surface along the equator and off the coast of Chile and Peru, said Stephanie Uz, ocean scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. In a process called upwelling, those cold waters normally bring up the nutrients that feed the tiny organisms, which form the base of the food chain.
"An El Nino basically stops the normal upwelling," Uz said. "There's a lot of starvation that happens to the marine food web." These tiny plants, called phytoplankton, are fish food -- without them, fish populations drop, and the fishing industries that many coastal regions depend on can collapse.
NASA satellite data and ocean color software