Townsend quoted in Press Herald report on changes occurring in Gulf of Maine
David Townsend, a biological oceanographer at the University of Maine, was quoted in Part One of the Portland Press Herald series, “Mayday: Gulf of Maine in distress.” The changing currents in the Gulf of Maine are likely due to the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and ice from the Arctic Ocean over the past two decades, which has dumped huge quantities of cold freshwater into the Labrador Sea, according to the article. Townsend said the localized effect has been the shifting of the extremely cold Labrador Slope Current away from the Gulf of Maine, resulting in greater deep-water inflows of warmer water coming up from the Gulf Stream to the south, the article states. “For reasons that we do not understand, there is less Labrador Slope water sitting outside the entrance to the Northeast Channel than there used to be,” he said, which is helping drive the past decade’s temperature spike in the Gulf.