The Blue Machine

And so the extraordinary consequence of upwelling water along the coast of South America isn’t just that it has produced a huge marine ecosystem in a relatively tiny area. It’s that it has provided the biological bounty to feed pigs and chickens (and, increasingly, farmed fish grown in other countries) all over the world. Those animals were raised to feed humans, who were probably blissfully unaware of the marine source of their protein, and also its colossal cost to the natural environment. The tiny anchoveta was just a link in the chain, the vehicle for nutrients. And the origin of that incredibly productive fishery is written in the surface temperature map of the ocean, because of the disturbance to the layered structure that it implies.