A dead sea star in West Vancouver, British Columbia. Photo: Christopher Harley/University of British Columbia

The recent heat wave in the Pacific Northwest and Canada has proven deadly. The death toll from the record-breaking heatwave that struck the US Pacific Northwest last week has risen to nearly 200. British Columbia reported at least 719 people suffered “sudden and unexpected deaths,” three times more than what would normally occur in the province during a seven-day period.  The impact on coastal sea life has also been devastating.

The New York Times reports that the combination of extraordinary heat and drought that hit the Western United States and Canada over the past two weeks has killed hundreds of millions of marine animals and continues to threaten untold species in freshwater, according to a preliminary estimate and interviews with scientists.

“It just feels like one of those postapocalyptic movies,” said Christopher Harley, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia who studies the effects of climate change on coastal marine ecosystems.

To calculate the death toll, Dr. Harley first looked at how many blue mussels live on a particular shoreline, how much of the area is good habitat for mussels and what fraction of the mussels he observed died. He estimated losses for the mussels alone in the hundreds of millions. Factoring in the other creatures that live in the mussel beds — barnacles, hermit crabs and other crustaceans, various worms, tiny sea cucumbers — puts the deaths at easily over a billion, he said.

Such extreme weather conditions will become more frequent and intense, scientists say, as climate change, driven by humans burning fossil fuels, wreaks havoc on animals and humans alike. A study by an international team of climate researchers found it would have been virtually impossible for such extremes to occur without global warming.

Heat Wave Impacts 1 Billion Sea Creatures In The Pacific Northwest