The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

by Jeff Goodell

“If a two-hundred-mile-long stretch of forest in the California mountains suddenly died, people would be shocked and outraged,” Laura Rogers-Bennett, a marine scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, told me when I visited her at the Bodega Marine Lab a few days after our dive. “We’re talking about the collapse of an entire ecosystem. But because it happened in the ocean, nobody notices.” Rogers-Bennett was one of the first scientists to understand the impact of marine heat waves like the Blob. In 2013, she was diving in Northern California when she saw a sea star that looked like it was melting. “When I touched it, its skin came off in my hand,” she recalled. And it wasn’t just one sea star, she discovered. This was the beginning of a mass die-off of twenty species of sea stars in the Pacific from a condition known as sea star wasting disease, which is linked to warming waters. With the loss of sea stars, which are one of the main predators of purple sea urchins, the urchin population exploded and devoured the kelp forests. “It’s very scary,” Rogers-Bennett said. “The Blob shows you how fast a tipping point can happen.”