You can't go home
The drive to Eastport from my home in southern Maine would typically take about four and a half hours, but I was towing my boat so I prepared for more than six hours on the road. Eastport is just north of Lubec, Maine, the easternmost town in the contiguous U.S., and adjacent to Passamaquoddy Bay, which has a tidal range of more than 20 feet (6 meters).
Diving at Eastport was always special for me, and I tried to visit there a couple of times each year. The nutrient-rich massive tides fed a series of stunning habitats along the coast. Diving most locations in New England is not without challenges, given the temperate water and frequently limited visibility.
Eastport had all of that, plus you could only effectively dive it at slack tide. You would get two or maybe three short dives each day, but none of this was a deterrent. For me, diving here was like swimming through a jewelry store. Invertebrates abounded on a shallow-water beach dive right in town.
Aiming my light in any direction during night dives revealed stalked tunicates, nudibranchs, basket stars, sun stars, and arrays of colorful anemones. Small stalks of soft corals reached into the night sea beside hermit crabs and redfish. Wolffish and lobsters peered out from rocky dens. Pushing a dive in slack tide to the maximum of maybe 40 minutes still was never enough time.
When I started working as a National Geographic magazine photographer in 1998, my work often took me far from New England. I had always wanted to produce a celebratory story about my native waters, the Gulf of Maine, but some urgent issue always drew my attention elsewhere. I missed places like Eastport but always knew I would eventually get back home.
It wasn’t until I read a scientific paper in 2015 that declared the Gulf of Maine as the epicenter of oceanic climate change that I realized an urgent issue was now in my backyard. Eventually had arrived for me. My native waters were warming faster than 97% of the rest of the global ocean, and I needed to return home, dive in, and share what I learned.
Stretching nearly 7,500 miles (12,070 kilometers) from the tip of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, at its southern boundary to Nova Scotia, Canada, in the north, the Gulf of Maine is one of the world’s most unique bodies of water. Its uniqueness stems from a geologic past that created a sea within a sea. The gulf’s distinct boundary features somewhat isolate it from the open Atlantic.
It is where the coldwater Labrador Current and warmwater Gulf Stream meet, resulting in a counterclockwise gyre that distributes nutrients and nourishes a labyrinth of seafloor habitats throughout the entire region. Combined with oceanic stratification, thanks to changing seasons, the result is a proliferation of biodiversity. Interconnectivity is key, with ecosystems such as salt marshes, estuaries, kelp beds, banks, ledges, deep basins, and more working together like the gears of a finely crafted engine designed for maximum output.
You can find more than 3,000 species of animals throughout the gulf, occupying habitats woven together in a coldwater tapestry of life. From coastal nurseries to deep coral canyons, the Gulf of Maine is pulsing with energy.
Centuries ago the Gulf of Maine became the place that lured explorers to undertake long, perilous journeys, encouraged colonization of America, and built fortunes and empires on species such as cod. Throughout the hundreds of years that followed, the region’s fisheries declined due to overfishing. Now the gulf’s cod population is 1% of colonial levels. Perhaps the greatest threat to these waters is the anthropogenic warming and the ancillary, negative impacts.
I researched and pulled together the pieces for a multiyear project in 2019 and began fieldwork in 2020. Having dived these waters for decades, I knew that weather and underwater conditions meant I would need time to produce results. My work would center on changes occurring due to climate, but I also wanted to help readers appreciate the beauty of biodiversity in these temperate waters by showcasing a gallery of interesting animals.
My initial photographic focus was on species that have rebounded thanks to conservation efforts. Seal populations, such as gray seals, had been decimated over centuries of slaughter. The Marine Mammal Protection Act was passed in 1972, and seals recovered during the ensuing decades. Increased seal populations attracted predatory sharks back to the region and helped rebuild seagrass and estuary ecosystems.
Another success story in the region is the alewife, a type of herring that is a protein source for a wide variety of animals in the sea, rivers, and forests through which the rivers flow. Whales, seals, birds, bobcats, and bass feed on these small fish during their yearly migrations. Alewife populations had declined substantially due to dams constructed on their ancient migration rivers, but they returned when the dams were removed from key rivers.
Next on the celebratory species component of my shooting agenda was to go to what I call the jewelry store, Eastport, where I hoped to produce a portfolio of exotic and colorful portraits. I pulled into town a few hours before sunset, and it looked pretty much the same as I remembered — quiet, quaint, and peaceful. It had been a few years, but while driving through town and looking at the ocean I felt the excitement building inside. I couldn’t wait to climb into my drysuit and slip beneath the surface.
The next evening my team and I were sitting on the tailgate of my truck, half-dressed in drysuits while waiting for slack tide. I glanced at my watch, noting the tide was almost slack, and then looked toward a buoy floating on the surface, which was no longer taut on its line. I grabbed my camera, walked into the sea, and descended.
Visibility was poor, worse than I remembered, and the water seemed noticeably warmer. It was still cold, but not as cold as it should be in April. A lot of particulate matter was drifting by, stuff I hadn’t seen before. The dive lasted 37 minutes, and we covered a lot of ground.
Invertebrate life on the rocks, slopes, and ledges was sparse. There were pockets where we could find some clusters, but it was nothing like it had been in the past. We dived twice each day in multiple locations for more than a week, but it was all the same. At the end of each dive, as I fought against the current heading back to my exit point, the same phrase echoed in my mind: ghost town. The place that had brought me so much joy and fond memories no longer existed.
Much of what is happening in the Gulf of Maine is happening globally in ocean ecosystems, but the unique oceanography that created the Gulf of Maine and made it so productive is now warming it faster as climate change accelerates. Charles Tilburg, PhD, director of the University of New England (UNE) School of Marine and Environmental Programs, describes the phenomenon in an article by Philip Shelley in UNE Magazine:
“Think of it as kind of like a bathtub,” says Tilburg. “And the temperature in this bathtub is being governed by heat from above, but also warm water and cold water flowing in. The hot-water faucet is the rivers and everything else. The cold-water faucet is the Labrador Current, which originates in the Labrador Sea and flows down along Newfoundland and Nova Scotia and enters the Gulf of Maine through the northeast channel. The Labrador Current also pushes the Gulf Stream current away, which is really warm water.”
But climate change — particularly Arctic warming — is beginning to influence the network of ocean currents, slowing and weakening longstanding cycles of warming and cooling that dictate patterns of water flow around the globe. “Since the early 2000s, the Labrador Current has been getting weaker,” explains Tilburg, “so we’re getting less cold water coming into the Gulf of Maine. At the same time, the Gulf Stream has been moving north, and we’re getting more warm water into the Gulf of Maine. Basically, we’re turning down the cold faucet, and we’re turning up the hot faucet — it’s no wonder the Gulf of Maine is getting warmer.”
Over the course of my photo coverage, I worked with several scientists who studied specific species over a long time, and each had data that showed troubling trends. Throughout my career as a photojournalist, I learned the power of visual storytelling, especially when trying to communicate environmental issues. With this project, I wanted to give visual context to the consequences of climate change to marine life and to people.
Lobsters are the animals most associated with the Gulf of Maine. Although most folks probably view them as fine dining, they are fascinating creatures with interesting life cycles and behaviors. As ground fishery stocks declined in New England and eastern Canada, lobsters became substantially more important to the economy. For the past several years the lobster fishery in Maine alone has been either the most valuable or second most valuable commercial fishery in the U.S., typically bringing in more than $500 million annually.
Warming seawater temperatures over the past decade reached a sweet spot for lobster reproduction and helped increase lobster stocks. During my fieldwork I discovered several locations where lobsters dug dens in the sand because the prime habitats — rocky crevices — were already taken by older lobsters that got there first. It was a lobster housing crisis that the animals could solve only by digging their own crater condos in the sand.
The American lobster is a temperate-water species, and as seawater temperatures continue to rise, the species steadily moves farther north. But the concern of declining stocks due to northward migration is only one problem. The recruitment of larval lobsters is crucial to a healthy population, and changes may negatively affect this life stage.
Larval lobsters spend the first 30 days of their lives drifting in the water column and feeding. One of their primary sources of nutrition is a copepod called Calanus finmarchicus, which is high in lipids and is also the primary food for North Atlantic right whales. As temperatures have increased, researchers have noticed that the copepods appear months before the larval lobsters arrive, creating an imbalance in the predator-prey relationship.
Zooplankton scientists are also monitoring signs that the copepod species’ lipid percentage is decreasing, so even if the little lobsters find them, they might not provide as much nutrition. During the time larval lobsters drift in the water column, precise currents carry them and eventually deposit them closer to shore in rocky habitats where they can hide, leading to higher recruitment. As the currents weaken, some tiny lobsters get deposited farther offshore, where they may be more vulnerable.
Researchers are also studying the effects of ocean acidification on the thin carapace of young lobsters and the olfactory system of adults. Erosion to either can result in declining stocks.
My photo coverage focused on several other bellwether species and ecosystems. Kelp forests have been steadily declining in coastal regions in the Gulf of Maine. Data collected by Doug Rasher, PhD, at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences show that as seawater temperatures rise, invasive red algae overtakes kelp communities, effectively remaking these habitats from kelp forests into turf habitats where the invasive algae dominate. Kelp is a nursery ecosystem for many species, including cod, and losing it has a substantial domino effect.
Seabirds, such as terns and puffins, are true canaries in the coal mine for measuring ocean health. As temperatures have increased in the Gulf of Maine, the normal prey fish that seabird parents feed their chicks — slender-bodied silver fish, such as herring — become scarce, while species rarely found here, such as wide-bodied silver butterfish, become more abundant. Parents foraging for silver fish bring back butterfish, which are too large for the chicks to swallow. The result is increasing mortality rates of tern and puffin chicks.
An invasive green crab that arrived on the eastern seaboard 150 years ago had been somewhat in check within the Gulf of Maine thanks to cold winters, but populations of the destructive crustacean that preys on clams and destroys estuary seagrasses have exploded with milder winters.
No solution to this problem existed until recently, when Mike Masi, an entrepreneurial former high school marine science teacher, and Sam Sewall, a fourth-generation lobsterman, created a business harvesting and selling soft-shelled green crab to restaurants. Markets for hard-shelled crabs also developed, and this company is now teaching others to start their own businesses. Maybe in time these efforts will make a dent in the biomass and help mitigate some of the economic impacts.
From an economic perspective, New Englander ingenuity and adaptability are strong, with shellfish aquaculture and kelp farming keeping working waterfronts humming with activity. But as a diver, I am troubled by the loss I have seen over 47 years of exploring these waters. Few of the things I once commonly saw underwater in the Gulf of Maine are there today, and there is almost none of the abundance.
Still, I know of the ocean’s resilience and have seen ecosystems rebound with conservation and strong protections in place. I believe that the Gulf of Maine has the potential to recover. In the way that any 12-step program begins with admitting there is a problem, we must collectively acknowledge the root cause of these ocean ills and implement large-scale solutions.
It has been said that you can’t go home, meaning that the person or the place you call home often changes. Regarding my native waters, I guess this is true. But I still feel shades of yesteryear on those days when the water is clear, green, and cold, and I see something beautiful. On those days, I dare to believe that anything is possible.
Explore More
Learn more about the Gulf of Maine in this video and in this article from the University of New England.
© Alert Diver – Q2 2025