Monterey Bay has already been dramatically affected by climate change

In 1993, a couple of Stanford juniors at the university’s Hopkins Marine Center in Monterey began a survey in the chilly waters of Monterey Bay. Digging around the in the rocks, they found the boundary markers for a survey of the Bay’s marine life by a 1930’s Stanford Ph.D. candidate named Willis Hewatt, who meticulously counted every anemone, whelk, snail, sea star, barnacle, limpet, and other animal along the 108 yards in between.

When Hewatt first looked at the tidepools, there were no tube snails or sunburst anemones at all, although both were prevalent further south. When Gilman and Sagarin did the same, they found hundreds of the southern anemones, and as many as 229 tube snails crowded into 1 square yard. In all, ten of eleven species previously identified as southerners increased significantly. Six of eight northern species decreased significantly. Those changes showed up regardless of what the animals ate, how they reproduced, or where they sat in the taxonomic hierarchy. Meanwhile, daily temperature records showed waters there had warmed about 1.8°F since Hewatt squatted in the surf

What they found was some of the earliest and most dramatic evidence of the changes in the ecosystem that have already taken place as a result of global warming.

This is taken from Feeling the Heat: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Climate Change a new book that is is excerpted in Tidepool, an online publication for "Rain Forest Coast" from South East Alaska down to Northern California.