Three decades ago, the Exxon Valdez ran aground killing hundreds of thousands of Common Murres, creating one of the largest environment disasters the Northeast Pacific had experienced. Thirty years later, murres and their Alcid relatives are threatened with starvation and reproductive failure brought on by broad-scale ocean warming. Alaskan murre populations have already lost millions of birds. Analysis of beached bird data spanning 30 years of monitoring suggest that predictable seasonal patterns in beached bird abundance are severely disrupted following major marine heatwave events. Event magnitude, duration and spatial extent are all positively associated with increased temperatures. When considered at the scale of a large marine ecosystem, the seabird community sustains multiple losses, with effects lasting at least three years. This talk will explore causality of the association between warmer waters and seabird mortality, and implications of these changes, while simultaneously uncovering who collects these data and how that might ultimately make a positive difference to Pacific Northwest coastal ecosystems.