STOCK DEFINITION AND GEOGRAPHIC RANGE Gray whales formerly occurred in the North Atlantic Ocean (Fraser 1970, Mead and Mitchell 1984), but this species is currently found only in the North Pacific (Rice et al. 1984). The following information was considered in classifying stock structure of gray whales based on the phylogeographic approach of Dizon et al. (1992): 1) Distributional data: two iso...

[1] The purpose of our analysis is both to evaluate the meteorological component of the seasonal and interannual variability of transpacific transport and to identify meteorological features that can be used to estimate transpacific transport. To accomplish this goal, we simulate the transport of nine continental tracers with uniform emissions and two-week lifetimes using the global Model of Oz...

S U M M A R Y Pacific Ocean crust west of southwest North America was formed by Cenozoic seafloor spreading between the large Pacific Plate and smaller microplates. The eastern limit of this seafloor, the continent–ocean boundary, is the fossil trench along which the microplates subducted and were mostly destroyed in Miocene time. The Pacific–North America Plate boundary motion today is concent...

The Magdalena fan is an apparently beheaded submarine depocenter that has figured prominently in Middle to late Miocene reconstructions of Pacific-North American plate interactions. The deposit accumulated rapidly at the base of the continental slope atop newly formed oceanic crust of the Farallon plate from 14.5-13 Ma. Subduction of this crust ceased as the Pacific-Farallon spreading center en...

Understanding the factors that influence population differentiation in temperate taxa can be difficult because the signatures of both historic and contemporary demographics are often reflected in population genetic patterns. Fortunately, analyses based on coalescent theory can help untangle the relative influence of these historic and contemporary factors. Common murres (Uria aalge) are vagile ...

Pacific herring show an abrupt genetic discontinuity in the central North Pacific that represents secondary contact between refuge populations previously isolated during Pleistocene glaciations. Paradoxically, high levels of gene flow produce genetic homogeneity among ocean-type populations within each group. Here, we surveyed variability in mtDNA control-region sequences (463 bp) and nine micr...

Tropical Pacific Ocean warming has been separated into two modes based on the spatial distribution of the maximum sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly: an east Pacific warming (EPW) and a central Pacific warming (CPW). When combined with east Pacific cooling (EPC), these three regimes are shown to have different impacts on tropical cyclone (TC) activity over the North Pacific by differential m...

Considerable evidence has emerged of a substantial decade-long change in the north Pacific atmosphere and ocean lasting from about 1976 to 1988. Observed significant changes in the atmospheric circulation throughout the troposphere revealed a deeper and eastward shifted Aleutian low pressure system in the winter half year which advected warmer and moister air along the west coast of North Ameri...