• Dangerous new hot zones are spreading around the world

    LA CORONILLA, Uruguay — The day the yellow clams turned black is
    seared in Ramón Agüero’s memory.

    September 16, 2019 - It was the summer of 1994. A few days earlier, he had collected a generous haul, 20 buckets of the thin-shelled,
    cold-water clams, which burrow a foot deep into the sand along a
    13-mile stretch of beach near Barra del Chuy, just south of the
    Brazilian border. Agüero had been digging up these clams since
    childhood, a livelihood passed on for generations along these shores.

    But on this day, Agüero returned to find a disastrous sight: the beach
    covered in dead clams.

    An empty yellow clamshell rests on the beach in Barra del Chuy,
    Uruguay. Clam harvests have plunged 95 percent from the peak of 220 tons in 1985 as ocean temperatures have warmed.

    “Kilometer after kilometer, as far as our eyes could see. All of them
    dead, rotten, opened up,” remembered Agüero, now 70. “They were all black, and had a fetid odor.” He wept at the sight.

    The clam die-off was an alarming marker of a new climate era, an early sign of this coastline’s transformation. Scientists now suspect the event was linked to a gigantic blob of warm water extending from the Uruguayan coast far into the South Atlantic, a blob that has only
    gotten warmer in the years since.

    (…)

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