The recent heatwave in the Pacific Northwest and Canada had a devastating impact on sea life, affecting mussels, clams, oysters and snails particularly hard. The New York Times reports:

The combination of extraordinary heat and drought that hit the Western United States and Canada over the past two weeks has killed hundreds of millions of marine animals and continues to threaten untold species in freshwater, according to a preliminary estimate and interviews with scientists.

“It just feels like one of those postapocalyptic movies,” said Christopher Harley, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia who studies the effects of climate change on coastal marine ecosystems.

Alyssa Gehman, a marine ecologist in Vancouver, British Colombia says she first discovered what had happened during a walk on the beach. She told MSNBC she noticed it smelled like “rotten, putrid cooking shellfish.” That’s when she realized that there were thousands of dead mussels, washed up on the beach. She blames climate change.

“These animals do experience high temperatures regularly. They are adapted to live in these sorts of conditions. But this was hotter than they could handle, they were literally cooking on the rocks, some of them up to 120 degrees.”

The Washington Post spoke with Ken Fong, head of the marine invertebrates stock assessment research program for Canada’s department of fisheries and oceans.

He attributed the incident to a “perfect storm”: A very low tide in the afternoon in the Strait of Georgia that happened to coincide with the hottest part of the day, exposing the sea animals to the worst of the extreme heat.

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Watch more from MSNBC above.