For 178 years, dams stood across the Penobscot River here, obstructing salmon and other river-run fish from reaching the watershed’s vast spawning grounds, which extend all the way to the Quebec border.
Now, two years after the dam’s removal, the salmon’s proponents fear the fish face a more fearsome threat: a warming sea.
In recent years, the Gulf of Maine has been one of the fastest-warming parts of the world’s oceans, and climate change models project average sea surface temperatures here to increase by another 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit by 2065, a development that could extirpate Atlantic salmon and other cold-loving species, many of which already find Maine at the southern edge of their ranges.
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