California’s salmon fishery reopens this spring after three years of devastating closures — and the forecast is the strongest in years. But the comeback story isn’t about wet winters or dam removals. It’s about what happened on April 11, 2023, when Kamchatka’s Shiveluch volcano blasted iron-rich ash across the North Pacific, replenishing vital dust to the ocean pastures where salmon put on 95 percent of their body weight. From Alaska’s 119 million pink salmon to California’s record jack returns, the 2023 ocean-entry cohorts are coming home strong everywhere. The volcano told us what the medicine is. The question is whether we’ll act before the next silent years return.
Headlines around the world herald the horrors of pirate fishing that is destroying what remains of global ocean fish stocks. But the same pirate fishing…