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Brown Waves on Oregon Coast Not Pollution |
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Covering 180 miles of Oregon coast travel: Astoria, Seaside, Cannon Beach, Manzanita, Nehalem, Wheeler, Rockaway, Garibaldi, Tillamook, Oceanside, Pacific City, Lincoln City, Depoe Bay, Newport, Waldport, Yachats & Florence.
11/13/07
Secrets of the Season |
Colored Waves on Oregon Beaches Cause Confusion
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| Brown foam at Seaside (photo Tiffany Boothe, Seaside Aquarium) |
(Seaside, Oregon) – Mysterious brown waves are freaking out visitors to the Oregon coast – especially the Seaside area. But there’s nothing inexplicable about it.
“Those folks unfamiliar with this phenomenon may think that the water is polluted or the beaches are dirty,” said Tiffany Boothe of the Seaside Aquarium. In fact, tourists have been enquiring at local businesses about the brown goo.
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“Seaside is experiencing a large diatom bloom, which is painting the surf brown and littering the beach with foam,” Boothe said.
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| Close up of diatom-caused brown foam (photo Boothe) |
Diatoms are the tiny phytoplanktons that actually form the sea foam that you see on the beaches.
With the calm conditions the coastal beaches are seeing now, after the stormy winds and high, broiling surf of Monday that churned up lots of foam, there’s a large amount of stuff all over the beaches. But especially foam and its creators – diatoms – have been roughed up and agitated into making a big appearance.
The result is waves with a lot of brown in them, brown goo lying around the beaches in the form of foam, and large tracts of dark, oily-looking spots on the sand.
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| Foam coalescing on the beach (photo: Boothe) |
The phenomenon is happening all over the coast, but especially around Seaside. In Gearhart, Cannon Beach Fultano’s Pizza owner David Johnson spotted quite a bit of the ruddy stuff in the waves earlier Tuesday.
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He also saw it in Cannon Beach.
“It’s there,” Johnson said. “You can see it on the waves and on the beach, although it’s hard to tell as much now because the tide has gone out. But I’d say it’s a little less than in Gearhart – but not much.”
On the central coast, fossil tour guide and beach expert Guy DiTorrice said there was some in the Newport area. “Some here, but no where near what we've seen with bigger and longer-term storms,” he said. “The north coast really got slammed a lot more than we did.”
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| Seaside's brown waves, seen from above (photo BeachConnection.net and Seaside Helicopters) |
“Is it oil? Sewage? Nope, it’s just diatoms,” Boothe said. “It’s one of the most important food sources in the ocean. In the spring and early summer, the diatoms multiply at the rate of one to two hundred billion in just 30 days.”
Boothe said they eat eat large amounts of nitrates and phosphates and leave behind carbohydrates, fats, proteins and vitamins – often in the sand. “Their bodies also store oil to live on.”
Everything in the ocean feeds on diatoms and other plankton, either directly or indirectly, Boothe said. “Even the great baleen whales filter planktons and diatoms depend on them for part of their diet,” she said.
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| Brown foam in Lincoln City |
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When diatoms get so abundant in the ocean, they may wash ashore during storms or westerly winds. This usually happens early spring, mid summer and early fall.
“When they do wash ashore, and being microscopic, they look like crude oil,” Boothe said. “If you look very closely at a thin layer, you will see it is a dark green, and not a crude oil at all.”
A
similar massive bloom of phytoplankton happened in spring, again concentrated
in the Seaside area. There, the waves were thick with the stuff, causing
the water to be very brown.
Nearby Cannon Beach also had quite a bit, and the diatoms were making an impression all the way down to the central coast, although not nearly as prominent. After about a week, the rest of the coast lost the foamy phenomenon, while Seaside’s run of russet ripples remained.
Boothe said this isn’t that uncommon. “It happens a lot, really,” she said. “A couple weeks ago, we had a lot of people asking if it was pollution.”
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