Conservation news

Big Bear Valley’s beloved bald eagle Jackie is dead

Spoorthy Raman — 13 Aug 2026 21:49:22 +0000

Jackie, a beloved bald eagle who called California’s Big Bear Valley in the U.S. home for all her life, has died. She was 14 years old. She was found on the ground, fighting with two young eagles on July 18 and was taken to the Ojai Raptor Center, where she was being treated for severe anemia and dehydration. The center announced< that she died in the evening hours of Aug. 9, 2026, despite intensive veterinary care and a blood transfusion. Jackie had additional health challenges after she was admitted, including a large blood clot in her wing and kidney, according to the center. Jackie and her mate Shadow gained worldwide attention through the Friends of Big Bear Valley’s live camera feed. The camera, set up in 2015 when another bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) pair used the nest, streamed the happenings at Jackie and Shadow’s 145-meter- (476-foot-) high abode, sitting atop a Jeffrey pine (Pinus jeffreyi). Since 2018, when this bonded pair began breeding, the public as they mated, laid eggs, hatched them and fed the chicks until they fledged. The pair successfully raised seven chicks but lost a few over the years. A dedicated Facebook page with 1.3 million followers, run by volunteers, regularly posted highlights about the goings on in the nest, entertaining and educating the public about bald eagles and their behavior. People virtually cheered as each chick reached a milestone and wept when they didn’t survive. Jackie at the Ojai Raptor Center, where she was being treated…This article was originally published on Mongabay

25 years after ‘disaster’ declaration, major U.S. fishery makes a comeback

Jules Struck — 05 Mar 2026 19:01:44 +0000

PORT ORFORD, Oregon, U.S. — Aaron Longton reached down into the rinsing sink in his garage-turned-fish-processing facility on the Oregon coast and hoisted a redbanded rockfish by its fat bottom lip. The homely fish was next in line for the dressing table, where Brian Morrissey, Longton’s “cutter-in-chief,” would deftly slice it into neat fillets, setting aside its guts and bones for crabbing chum. Morrisey had about 250 kilograms (550 pounds) of the rockfish (Sebastes babcocki) to get through that day, and 90 kg (200 lbs) of lingcod (Ophiodon elongatus), he said, his knife unzipping yet another fish. An unthinkable abundance only 20 years ago. “These fish were really severely limited to us,” said Longton, founder of Port Orford Sustainable Seafood, a company that sells fish via a subscription program. “Now, we have huge quotas.” Redbanded rockfish (Sebastes babcocki), one of the groundfish species whose stock has been rebuilt on the U.S. West Coast, being processed at Port Orford Sustainable Seafood. Image by Jules Struck for Mongabay. The groundfish Longton hauls to his processing room from the pier down the street are the spoils of a painstakingly rebuilt industry. Twenty-six years ago, the West Coast groundfish industry, which encompasses more than 90 species of bottom-dwelling fish off Washington, Oregon and California, had overfished itself to near devastation. In response, fisheries authorities closed vast tracts of the ocean to trawling and slashed fishing quotas, throwing many fishers into painful retirement. But in the aftermath, an unlikely corps materialized of fishers, scientists, conservationists…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Century-old corals reveal the Pacific Northwest is acidifying faster than expected

Elizabeth Fitt — 22 Dec 2025 15:10:57 +0000

In 1888, researchers aboard the R/V Albatross began the world’s first concentrated marine research expeditions off California’s Pacific coast. The team collected untold plant and animal specimens, including orange cup corals from the Salish Sea, which they carefully preserved and stored in collections at the Smithsonian Institution. These specimens have now become rare physical evidence of ongoing changes in the chemistry of the Pacific Ocean as seawater absorbs the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. Researchers recently analyzed these 130-year-old samples, which come from a time before the Industrial Revolution’s greenhouse gas impacts had really kicked in. Then they compared them with new specimens collected in the same locations by a team aboard another research vessel, the R/V Rachel Carson, in 2020. They discovered that this region is acidifying, far faster than models have predicted, findings they recently published in the journal Nature Communications. “Ocean acidification is not a distant or abstract phenomenon. It is already underway, it is amplified in some regions, and it has real consequences for ecosystems and coastal economies today,” study lead author Mary Margaret Stoll, from the University of Washington, told Mongabay. This research focused on the Salish Sea and the cold California Current System, an interweave of four currents predominantly flowing south from the Canadian province of British Columbia to the Mexican state of Baja California. Prevailing winds push water away from the coast along these currents, drawing water up from the deep, bringing nutrient-rich sediments along with it. These…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Fixing forests or fueling fires? Scientists split over active management

John Cannon — 13 Aug 2025 22:26:52 +0000

This is the first installment of Mongabay’s coverage of active management tools for forest fires. Read Part 2. On Sept. 8, 2020, a brush field in southern Oregon, in the northwestern U.S., caught fire. Over the next week, “walls” of flame tore through the towns of Talent and Phoenix in the Rogue River Valley. Here, hot, dry summers crisp low-lying vegetation, and convective winds — like those that kicked up in early September 2020 — can fan the spread of fire from even the smallest ignition. The 1,300-hectare (3,300-acre) Almeda Drive Fire was small by contemporary standards in the U.S. West, where blazes repeatedly shatter records. And this one was human-caused, as are more than 80% of fires in the U.S. But neither statistic made it any less devastating to the families of Talent and Phoenix, more than 2,600 of whom lost their homes to the blaze. Amid a swirling mix of past mismanagement of forests in the western U.S., an explosion of dense settlements, and hotter, drier conditions on account of climate change, there’s been a push in recent decades to actively manage forests for fire risk — aimed at avoiding disasters like the Almeda fire. The idea is that management tools such as forest thinning, prescribed burning and post-fire restoration can help claw back some of the characteristics of how forests used to be, when fire itself was a more active part of the landscape. The scientific literature is stacked with studies on the nuances of “active management,”…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Largest dam removal ever, driven by Tribes, kicks off Klamath River recovery

Liz Kimbrough — 17 Oct 2024 20:33:10 +0000

KLAMATH, CALIFORNIA—Brook M. Thompson was just 7 years old when she witnessed an apocalypse. “A day after our world renewal ceremony, we saw all these fish lined up on the shores, just rotting in piles,” says Thompson, a Yurok tribal member who is also Karuk and living in present-day Northern California. “This is something that’s never happened in our oral history, since time immemorial.” During the 2002 fish kill in the Klamath River, an estimated 30,000 to 70,000 salmon died when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation diverted water to farms instead of letting it flow downstream. This catastrophic event catalyzed a movement to remove four dams that had choked the river for nearly a century. Now, that decades-long tribal-led movement has finally come to fruition. As of Oct. 5, the four lower Klamath hydroelectric dams have been fully removed from the river, freeing 676 kilometers (420 miles) of the river and its tributaries. This is the largest dam-removal project in history. Brook M. Thompson, a member of the Yurok Tribe who is also of Karuk Tribal descent, holds a piece of a demolished Iron gate dam on the Klamath River in early 2024. Photo courtesy of Brook M. Thompson. “This has been 20-plus years in the making, my entire life, and why I went to university, why I’m doing the degrees I’m doing now,” says Thompson, who is an artist, a restoration engineer for the Yurok Tribe and pursuing a Ph.D. in environmental studies at the University of California, Santa…This article was originally published on Mongabay

How a 160-year-old pelt piqued new findings on Indigenous ‘woolly dog’ breed

Sonam Lama Hyolmo — 22 Dec 2023 20:41:30 +0000

If any dog has held much of a cultural, economic, and spiritual significance to the Indigenous nations in the Pacific Northwest Coast, it was the Coast Salish woolly dog. In British Columbia, Washington and Oregon, their fluffy fleece and thick undercoats were sheared like sheep by high-status women and spun together to weave colorful blankets and textiles. In a new study, a team of researchers from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History partnered with Coast Salish Indigenous communities to explore the breed’s origins and sudden disappearance. The researchers analyzed the 160-year-old pelt of an extinct woolly dog named Mutton, the last known of its breed. The fluffy canine died in 1859 under the care of naturalist and ethnographer George Gibbs. The pelt has since resided in the museum, and its existence was little known until it was rediscovered in the early 2000s. After studying the genome in the pelt, researchers say numerous sociocultural factors are likely responsible for the species’ disappearance. Chief among them were the impacts of European colonization. Although Mutton’s genetics could tell little about what caused this dog’s death, this is the first time the genome of a woolly dog has been sequenced, said Audrey Lin, corresponding author and evolutionary molecular biologist from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Based on the genetic data, they estimated that woolly dogs biologically evolved from other breeds about 5,000 years ago. The team found out that nearly 85% of Mutton’s ancestry was linked to precolonial dogs before the…This article was originally published on Mongabay

NASA satellites reveal restoration power of beavers

Jeremy Hance — 11 Sep 2023 16:45:17 +0000

If humans went extinct tomorrow, who would rule the world? Beavers. Well, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. These tree-felling, water-slowing, wetland-creating rodent engineers have a massive impact wherever they live. Indeed, when it comes to their power over water flow, Cory Mosby says, “I’m not aware of another species that does this (save humans) on the scale that a beaver population can.” A biologist with the Idaho Department of Fish and Wildlife, Mosby knows the power of these mammals intimately. And now NASA — yes, the same agency that sends people into space and searches for killer comets — is helping researchers get a more detailed look at how beavers can transform our world for the better, including combating climate change. Beaver dam on an Idaho creek. Image courtesy of Boise State University. “NASA is interested in how satellite Earth observations can be used for natural resource management,” says Cynthia Schmidt, the associate program manager for the NASA Ecological Conservation Program. In this particular case, Schmidt says, NASA is keen to use satellite research to help scientists “better understand the impacts of rewilding for ecosystem restoration.” Working with Jodi Brandt, a professor of human-environment systems at Boise State University, they are tracking just how quickly and verdantly reintroduced beavers change Idaho’s landscape. Already, the program has been able to produce images taken from space of how areas with reintroduced beavers are greener — i.e. have more vegetation — than areas without them. Water lords North America once housed more beavers than…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Virtual fences can benefit both ranchers and wildlife

Ruth Kamnitzer — 19 Jul 2023 12:40:16 +0000

The old Figlenski Ranch in Washington state’s Tunk Valley is a rugged land of canyons and scrubby sage-brush steppe. This valley with the ranch at its center connects the Cascade and the Rocky Mountain ranges, where lynx, wolverines and even grizzly bears pass through. It’s also winter range for the state’s largest mule deer herd, and contains breeding grounds for Columbian sharp-tailed grouse. At more than 3,600 hectares (9,000 acres), this land was part of the original Colville Indian Reservation, but had been in the Figlenski family since 1904. Ernie Figlenski was the last in his line and, just days before he died in 2021, signed an agreement with Conservation Northwest — a nonprofit working for wildlife and wildlands from Washington state to the Canadian Rockies — to purchase the land and put it under a conservation covenant. Conservation Northwest then returned the land to the Colville Confederated Tribes, who subsequently leased it to Joy and Mike Wilson, who have been ranching in the area for many years. “We took some friends on a tour, and they said Glacier National Park had nothing on our land,” Mike Wilson says. But beauty aside, there’s something else notable about this particular property. Mike Wilson on his ranch in the Tunk Valley, Washington State. Image courtesy of Joy and Mike Wilson. When the Okanogan Complex fire came through in 2015, the fence posts supporting the barbed wire burned, and no one put them back. That’s uncommon in the American West, where fences typically…This article was originally published on Mongabay

How do you study one of the world’s rarest whales?

Dana Wright — 25 Apr 2023 19:58:33 +0000

Nearly twice the size of Africa, the North Pacific seems to be endless. But somewhere in that vast ocean, 30 eastern North Pacific right whales (Eubalaena japonica) live their lives, mostly out of the view of human observers. These remaining leviathans are the survivors of past Yankee whaling – in Herman Melville’s famous words “so remorseless a havoc” – and are the most endangered population of whales on our planet. Historically this population numbered in the tens of thousands. I am one of the handful of scientists actively working toward their conservation. I also happen to be someone who’s never seen a living North Pacific right whale. I started working with this species nearly a decade ago when I was hired to analyze underwater acoustic recordings on the presumed feeding ground of these whales in the southern Bering Sea off Alaska. Laboriously, I reviewed every minute of every recording looking for right whale calls, because computer algorithms still struggle to find right whale calls amidst the cacophony of animal sounds in this region. In total, I have analyzed tens of thousands of hours of recordings, listening and looking for right whales. As I worked through these recordings, I came to recognize the seasonal patterns of their calls on the feeding grounds, first appearing in late spring and then disappearing in late fall as the sea ice approached. I observed this rhythmic relationship with sea ice for over a dozen marine mammal species, that together create a symphony of sound that…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Tribe and partners light up a forest to restore landscape in California

Carly Nairn — 08 Nov 2022 18:35:46 +0000

ORLEANS, California—An elemental smell wafts through the Klamath mountains in early autumn—woodsmoke. Despite the U.S. Forest Service’s intermittent bans on lighting fires in the forest, the Karuk Tribe is maintaining its cultural practice of intermittent burns to conserve their traditional lands in northern California. With the Tribe’s oversight, a partnership with the Forest Service and other stakeholders introduced the Somes Bar Restoration Project in 2018. Using traditional fire techniques, it targets 2,254 hectares (5,570 acres) of land. Although the project is multilayered and partners hold different priorities, all agree that the project is an ongoing, if slow-moving, success to safeguard the rich biodiversity of hardwoods, conifers, deciduous oaks and an almost endless variety of alpine plant life in the Klamath mountains. And their restoration tool: fire. The start of burn practices by Indigenous people participating in a fire training event in October 2022. Images by bay laurel O’Connor/courtesy of the Karuk Tribe. “Our purpose is to protect this place,” says Annelia Hillman, a Yurok Tribe member who participated in a fire managing training session organized by the Karuk Tribe. “We need to be able to take care of it.” In the past few years, California wildfires have been burning hotter and with more intensity, which makes them harder to fight. They destroy habitats, like a grove of redwoods, that are generally resilient to low-intensity fires. The ongoing drought, and the proliferation of dry leaves, ferns, twigs and other organic matter on the forest floor that catch fire easily, are also factors…This article was originally published on Mongabay

‘Monument trees’ underpin Alaska Native cultural resilience: they must be protected (commentary)

Audrey Clavijo — 25 Jul 2022 23:59:06 +0000

Despite heavy-duty rain gear and Xtratuf Boots, I am soaked to the bone. But you can’t put money on a sunny day in the world’s largest temperate rainforest – the Tongass National Forest – even in Kéex’ Kwáan (Kake), considered to be the sunniest town in Southeast Alaska. I trudge onwards, thankful for the old growth cedar and spruce canopy above, doing its best to shield us from the downpour. Five Alaska Native youth with a box of 6-inch cedar seedlings (‘stecklings’) rambunctiously follow, working their way through the berry bushes in an attempt to lead the group. The youth are crew members of a native stewardship and conservation program called the Alaskan Youth Stewards (AYS); it is my third summer as their crew leader. Unlike me, raised in the boiling hot and humid summers of Georgia, the crew members have grown up in Kake and thrive in the chilly, wet forest conditions. Ethan, who’s taken the lead, points upwards to a giant cedar snag with the girth of a poker table. “Look!” A scar the width of two hands runs up the cedar’s trunk about 30 meters, narrowing to a point. The youth stare in collective silence up at the culturally-modified tree – a cedar tree from which bark has been harvested for Alaska Native cultural purposes. Perhaps it was one of their ancestors who harvested that strip of cedar bark hundreds of years ago. Kasaan carver Stormy Hamar stands with a partially-finished cedar dug-out canoe. Image by Bethany Goodrich/Sustainable…This article was originally published on Mongabay

When Chinook salmon is off the menu, other prey will do for endangered orcas

Elizabeth Claire Alberts — 03 Mar 2021 19:58:24 +0000

For nearly 20 years, Robin Baird has been following killer whales, trying to figure out what they eat. At first, he would look to see what was in their mouths as the whales feasted on fish near the surface. But then he and his colleague, Brad Hanson, started looking for more subtle clues in their flukeprints — the orbs of placid water that appear on the surface when a killer whale dives into the sea, or flicks its tail underwater. In or around these flukeprints, you can find fish scales and fecal matter, which provide a treasure trove of information. “If they’re catching things near the surface of the water, it’s much [easier] to be able to document than if they’re capturing things at depth,” Baird, a research biologist at Cascadia Research Collective, told Mongabay in an interview. “What the fecal samples do is they show … a higher proportion of things like lingcod and halibut and sole flounder [that] are caught deeper in the water column and less likely to be brought up to the surface.” Southern Resident Killer Whale mother and her calf swimming. Image by NOAA / Public Domain. A new study published March 3 in PLOS ONE provides a comprehensive look at the diet of the endangered southern resident killer whales (Orcinus orca), or orcas, that inhabit the Pacific coast between the U.S. and Canada, as well as the inland waterways of Washington state, during the spring, summer and fall months. By analyzing 150 prey and fecal…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Indigenous peoples unite in fight to heal the Salish Sea

Lauren Crothers — 01 Feb 2019 13:14:22 +0000

For thousands of years, people of the Lummi Nation in Washington state have treasured their deep connection to the orca pods that populate the waters of the Salish Sea. It’s a bond just as familiar to British Columbia’s Tsleil-Waututh Nation, and other coastal Salish communities whose way of life has depended deeply on both the water and the land. The groups say they fear that proposed construction of a new port terminal in British Columbia’s Roberts Bank delta, just a stone’s throw from the U.S. border, will endanger their qwe ‘lhol mechen — relations below the waves — possibly to the point of driving the orcas to extinction. At the heart of their call is a plea for a moratorium to be introduced on “any additional potential stressors, including marine vessel traffic and associated development, to the Salish Sea” — a sea they described as “bleeding,” during a press conference Jan. 30. According to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Registry, the proposed three-berth marine container terminal 29 kilometers (18 miles) south of Vancouver “would provide an additional 2.4 million twenty-foot equivalent units of container capacity per year at Roberts Bank.” Ocean Networks Canada installations and data sources in the Salish Sea. Image courtesy Ocean Networks Canada. The Center for Whale Research, which monitors the Southern Resident Killer Whales, can now only account for 74 orcas spread across three pods in the area; two of the whales, which rely heavily on salmon for the majority of their diet, are expected to die…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Pod-cast: New app streams whale songs for web users in real time

Sue Palminteri (1965-2019) — 19 Nov 2018 14:06:50 +0000

Researchers have developed a web-based application to enable citizen scientists to listen to the sounds of killer whales in the northeast Pacific in real time. Publicly launched on Nov. 1, after several months of testing, the app livestreams audio from underwater microphones, called hydrophones, located in the Salish Sea off the U.S. state of Washington, through the internet to a user’s laptop, phone or tablet. The Orcasound project produced the app to help raise awareness and understanding about ocean noise, and where and when humans and whales overlap, by broadening the audience listening for the signals of known pods of killer whales (Orcinus orca) and other novel sounds, such as other marine animals or human activity. A killer whale, or orca, “porpoising” in the Hood Canal waterway, south of the Salish Sea in the U.S. state of Washington. Leaping out of the water can actually be energy-efficient for marine animals traveling at high speeds. Image by Minette Layne via Wikimedia Commons CC 2.0. Scott Veirs, an oceanographer and bioacoustics specialist, and his father, Val Veirs, a physicist, lead the project, which started with funding from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The project’s partners now include United States and Canadian fisheries agencies and several nonprofit organizations, including scientists who have studied ocean sounds in the region for more than 15 years to call attention to the damage caused by noise pollution in the ocean. The younger Veirs, Orcasound’s lead researcher, presented the new web app and spoke about…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Mongabay discusses technology’s role in conservation at Seattle event [VIDEO]

Erik Hoffner — 13 Jun 2018 10:48:46 +0000

Last month, Seattle Audubon hosted a panel discussion featuring Mongabay staff and colleagues about the ever-growing applications of technology for conservation. Mongabay Founder and CEO Rhett A. Butler moderated the event. He was joined by Mongabay Wildtech editor Suzanne Palminteri, plus board member Christopher Herndon, who co-founded the conservation group Acaté Amazon Conservation, which uses a range of technology for its projects supporting the Matsés indigenous community in Peru. They were joined onstage by Seattle Audubon’s Dr. Megan Friesen, a bioacoustics researcher and recent guest on Mongabay’s podcast where she discussed her work discovering the breeding behavior of secretive seabirds. Following a discussion of the many ways the panelists see technology being applied to conservation these days, from drones to remote sensing, GPS and artificial intelligence, the group then answered questions from a crowd of around 50 attendees, including these: How can engineers who’d like to apply their knowhow to conservation challenges discover new problems they can help to solve? Museum collections are full of useful data, has there been any effort to digitize and share the data contained in these collections? Is there much collaboration among agencies and NGOs using technology to help indigenous peoples map their traditional territories? What impact has open software had on conservation? Here’s the full event recording: Moderator and speaker bios: Rhett Butler founded Mongabay.com in 1999 out of his passion for nature and wildlife. For the first ten years of the project, he operated Mongabay on his own, publishing thousands of stories and tens of…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Earth Day founding organizer calls for end to plastic pollution

Erik Hoffner — 18 Apr 2018 10:54:50 +0000

Denis Hayes was the principal national organizer of the first Earth Day in 1970, and he took the event to the international stage in 1990. He is board chair of the international Earth Day Network, and President of the Bullitt Foundation. Earth Day 2018 is slated for April 22 and focuses on plastic pollution, so Mongabay took the opportunity to ask him about this year’s event and find out what else is on the mind of this key leader of the international environmental movement. INTERVIEW WITH DENIS HAYES Erik Hoffner for Mongabay: What was the impetus for the first Earth Day, nearly 50 years ago now? Denis Hayes: There were hundreds of important “environmental” issues before the first Earth Day: DDT & bird deaths. Air & water pollution. Oil spills. Herbicide use in Southeast Asia. Wilderness areas. But they were commonly viewed as unrelated. One prominent leader actually asked me, “What the hell does air pollution have to do with birds?” Earth Day took all these myriad strands and wove them into the fabric of modern environmentalism—linked by a coherent set of values and grounded in an ecological framework. When added together, they formed the basis for a formidable new political force. New York Times front page, April 1970. Mongabay: What’s the theme of this year’s Earth Day, and how can people get involved? Denis Hayes: The 2018 theme is “End Plastic Pollution.” There is not much that the average person can do about the Pacific Garbage Patch or to ban…This article was originally published on Mongabay

As Northwest salmon economy teeters on brink, Trump gives it a push

Saul Elbein — 23 Oct 2017 09:55:45 +0000

Salmon fisherman Malcolm Sampson, an ethnic-Tsimshian and member of the Lax Kwalaams First Nation. Photo © Jim McAuley LAX KWALAAMS, British Colombia: Four years ago, Malcolm Sampson says, the ocean changed in a way that terrified him. Now in his 60s, Sampson, an ethnic-Tsimshian and member of the Lax Kwalaams First Nation, had spent his entire life hunting salmon in the open ocean and torturous passages of Canada’s North Coast, just south of the Alaska border. But he had never seen anything like that: “The water went warm,” he said, nodding down at the blue-gray waves lapping at his boat, anchored about a mile offshore. In the distance, we could see the forbidding heights of British Columbia’s coastal range poking through the haze. Sampson was dour. “We pulled the sockeye out of the gill nets still alive, and they were already rotting,” he said. Algae bloomed on the water’s surface, pushing the surviving salmon far out to sea. Throughout the fishery, he said, the harvest collapsed. By the time colder seas returned in 2017, the years of bad catches had eviscerated Lax Kwalaams’ commercial fishing fleet. When Sampson took off this morning from the small reserve town, he left a marina full of fishing boats bobbing, but half-abandoned, in their docks, their captains having given up. “You just can’t make money at it anymore,” Sampson said, shaking his head. He lives in Lax Kwalaams, an indigenous reserve village of about 600, largely members of the nine tribes of the Tsimshian,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Scientists say frozen methane deposits off the coast of the US Pacific Northwest might be melting

Mike Gaworecki — 16 Oct 2015 02:07:06 +0000

New research suggests methane deposits that have been frozen in the seabed off the coasts of Oregon and Washington for thousands of years might have begun to melt and bubble up through the warming ocean waters. Methane gas is slowly released from the ocean’s floor at almost all depths along the Pacific Northwest’s coastal margin, but researchers at the University of Washington say they’ve found that plumes of the potent greenhouse gas are significantly more common at a depth of 500 meters (0.3 miles) — precisely where it was expected that frozen methane, known as methane hydrate, would start to melt due to rising ocean temperatures. A team of researchers at the University of Washington studied 168 methane bubble plumes that had been observed over the past decade and determined that 14 of them were located at that crucial transition depth, far more plumes per unit area than any other part of the region’s seafloor. The results of the UW researchers’ study have been accepted for publication in the American Geophysical Union journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems. Sonar image of bubbles rising from the seafloor off the Washington coast. The base of the column is 515 meters deep (about 1/3 of a mile) and the top of the plume is at 1/10 of a mile (180 meters) deep. Credit: Brendan Philip/University of Washington “What we’re seeing is possible confirmation of what we predicted from the water temperatures: Methane hydrate appears to be decomposing and releasing a lot of gas,” H. Paul…This article was originally published on Mongabay