What is a weather blob?
What is a weather blob?
The Blob is caused by a combination of warmer air temperatures (that warms the ocean’s surface), changes in the patterns of wind speed, direction and duration (wind helps mix the ocean and by bringing cool water from depth) and the persistent mass of warmer water along the equator known as ENSO.
What is the blob in Alaska?
By summer of 2014, the heated mass of water stretched from Alaska to Mexico and had been nicknamed “the blob.” As the blob spread, unusually warm waters triggered extended harmful algae blooms. Although such blooms are common, they usually only last a couple of weeks before dissipating.
What is the southern blob?
(CNN) In the southwest Pacific Ocean, there’s a huge region of unusually warm water covering an area about the size of Australia, known as “the Southern Blob.”
What is the heat blob in the Pacific Ocean doing to climate?
The heat wave may cause a source of food to die off or migrate. Heat waves can also lead to toxic algae blooms that can kill fish. The events can affect humans, too. The blob in the Pacific may have influenced weather patterns on the West Coast, worsening drought in California, for example.
When did the Blob happen?
In late 2013, a huge patch of unusually warm ocean water, roughly one-third the size of the contiguous United States, formed in the Gulf of Alaska and began to spread. A few months later, Nick Bond, a climate scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, dubbed it The Blob.
Where is the cold blob?
the North Atlantic Ocean
Iceland’s glaciers are melting more slowly than expected because they are close to a “cool blob” of water in the North Atlantic Ocean.
What caused the Blob?
Marine heat waves like The Blob are caused by combinations of several factors, such as high air temperatures, changing wind patterns, and regular ocean warming events like the El Niño Southern Oscillation in the Pacific Ocean.
What is sea blob?
Scientists have for the first time identified a small gelatinous blob in the deep sea as a new species, using only high-definition underwater cameras. The creature, officially known as Duobrachium sparksae, is a new species of ctenophore, or comb jelly.
What does the Arctic represent in the Blob?
In a prescient moment at the end, McQueen declares Earth to be safe from the Blob as long as the Arctic stays cold, which, in 1958, was taken to mean forever. This sentiment was surely reassuring to millions of people who thought they might die any minute in a Soviet nuclear attack.
What causes marine heatwaves?
Marine heatwaves are caused by a variety of factors, including shorter term weather phenomena such as fronts, intraseasonal, annual, or decadal modes like El Niño events, and longer term changes like climate change.
What causes ocean heat?
Increasing ocean heat content is contributing to sea level rise, ocean heat waves and coral bleaching, and melting of ocean-terminating glaciers and ice sheets around Greenland and Antarctica. Heat already stored in the ocean will eventually be released, committing Earth to additional surface warming in the future.
What causes the cold blob?
AMOC is driven by ocean temperature and salinity differences. The major possible mechanism causing the cold ocean surface temperature anomaly is based on the fact that freshwater decreases ocean water salinity, and through this process prevents colder waters sinking.