Bering Sea

How cold is the water in the Bering Sea? That’s what a group of researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wants to know. NOAA is currently out in the Aleutian Islands running their annual Eastern Bering Sea Bottom Trawl Survey. They've been running annual surveys since the 1970s, mainly to collect data on the distribution and abundance of bottom-dwelling species like crab and groundfish. But this year they’re paying special attention to the cold pool—a section of bottom water that stays cold through the summer. It affects everything from when fish spawn to what part of the ocean they live in.

ST. PAUL — The Trident Seafoods plant tucked inside this island’s small port is the largest snow crab processor in the nation. On a cold clear day in January, three Trident workers, within the hold of the Seattle-based Pinnacle, grabbed bunches of the shellfish, and placed them in an enormous brailer basket for their brief trip across a dock. The crab were fed into a hopper to be butchered, cooked, brined and frozen. Few of the 360 people who live on St. Paul, largest of the four Pribilof Islands, have opted to work in the plant. Instead jobs are filled with recruits from elsewhere. But the plant still remains a financial underpinning of this Aleut community. Trident pays taxes that help bankroll the expansive services of a city government, which rents apartments, leases construction equipment and even provides plumbers and electricians to make repairs.

ABOARD THE PINNACLE, Bering Sea — Through the wheelhouse window, captain Mark Casto spotted a white line on the horizon. The edge of an ice floe was illuminated by bow lights piercing the morning darkness of the Bering Sea. He throttled back the engines. Soon, the Seattle-based crab boat began to nose through closely packed pancake-like pieces and bigger craggy chunks, some the size of boulders, which bobbed about in the currents and clanged against the hull. Casto had hoped this patch of sea would yield a bountiful catch of snow crab to help fill up the boat. Nearby, a few hours earlier, he had set more than two dozen baited pots along the sea bottom. Now, he risked losing them in the fast-moving ice.

A U.S. Coast Guard cutter and its 140 crew members returned to California late last month after a nearly 80-day patrol in the Bering Sea. The 418-foot Waesche — a vessel longer than a football field — traveled more than 12,000 miles since departing Alameda in November. Its patrol spanned the West Coast, Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands and Gulf of Alaska.

The so-called blob that brought warm surface water temperatures to the Gulf of Alaska between 2014 and 2016 has passed.But the effects of that blob, and a subsequent heat wave in 2019, are not all in the rearview mirror. And researchers are bracing for more as climate change brings with it more ocean warming.

All three Kenai Peninsula representatives to Juneau have signed onto a letter to the council that oversees commercial fishing in Alaska’s federal waters, joining a bipartisan chorus of voices demanding reduction of halibut bycatch.Specifically, representatives are asking the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to approve Alternative 4 at its meeting next week, which would take the most significant swing toward linking the trawl fleet’s fishing with halibut abundance in the Bering Sea.

A fuel ration on the Pribilof Island of St. Paul ended Tuesday after more than a month and a half of limiting fuel for both residents and fishermen.The…

A group of Bering Sea crabbers say the pandemic has slowed their fishing season, and they want more time to catch their quota before the state shuts down…

The COVID-19 pandemic has already disrupted Alaska's winter Bering Sea fishing seasons, closing plants and adding quarantine-related complications for…

While much of Alaska has been bitterly cold this month, the Aleutian Islands and Alaska Peninsula have been extraordinarily mild. It's part of the recent…