That Time We Tried to Live Under the Sea Off California

In the 1960s, as America raced to the Moon, the Navy sent aquanauts to the ocean floor off La Jolla in an ambitious experiment called SEALAB II.

The U.S. Navy’s SEALAB II habitat is prepared for deployment in 1965, as support ships stand by off the Southern California coast. Lowered to about 205 feet near La Jolla, the experimental underwater station would house teams of aquanauts for weeks at a time, testing whether humans could live and work on the ocean floor. (Photo: U.S. Navy)
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Lately, with Artemis II swinging around the far side of the Moon and sending back stunning footage of an earthrise, space is kind of exciting again. Seeing Earth from that perspective reminds us what big, ambitious projects can do…recent NASA defunding notwithstanding (what a disaster).

But!

As I’ve written here before: while we look up, it’s also worth remembering to look down.

In the early days of the space race, that was the mindset as well. As the Gemini program was getting underway, building on the earlier Mercury program missions (“Godspeed, John Glenn”), there was a parallel effort to go the other way. Not into orbit, but deep down…into the ocean. The aspirations were similar: If humans could learn to live in space, maybe they could learn to live on the seafloor too.

For a brief window, we were serious about both. And there were even a few individuals who were part of the two programs: astronaut/aquanaut Scott Carpenter was one of them.

Unfortunately, while we managed to go to the moon on Apollo (and hopefully soon again with Artemis), the ocean effort stalled and never really came back. That story is largely forgotten now, but it’s interesting, and it has a very specific California angle. In fact, one of the most ambitious attempts to allow humans to live on the ocean floor took place just off San Diego, coincidentally, near the same stretch of sea where the Artemis astronauts recently splashed down to Earth decades later.

The first of three Sealab II teams. Former astronaut Scott Carpenter, team one leader, is second from left in the front row. (Photo: U.S. Navy)

The project was called SEALAB II. Let’s get into it.

There were many reasons to try to live beneath the waves. The scientific potential was enormous, but so were the military applications. Aquanauts, as they were called, could work for hours at depth, something that was nearly impossible before.

There was a distinct national vibe for this kind of thing.

In 1963, John F. Kennedy told the National Academy of Sciences, “To a surprising extent, the sea has remained a mystery. We know less about the oceans at our feet than the sky above our heads.” He pushed Congress to invest in ocean research, warning that “knowledge of the oceans is more than a matter of curiosity. Our very survival may hinge upon it.” That remains true.

Living underwater may not seem as extreme as space, but it comes with its own set of problems. Breathing is the obvious one. We can’t inhale water. Then there’s pressure, which increases rapidly with depth and changes how the body functions. It has a tendency to crush things. Even shallow diving can cause problems. As a certified scuba diver, I’ve had several scary moments underwater in my lifetime. Further, deep water is cold, and water has a much higher thermal conductivity than air, so you lose heat much faster. Visibility is limited. And yes, there are living things down there that can kill you.

In other words, if humans were going to live underwater, there was a lot to figure out.

A U.S. Navy diver documents the deployment of the SEALAB I habitat in 1964, as the experimental underwater station is lowered into position off Bermuda to test whether humans could live and work on the ocean floor. (Photo: U.S. Navy)

The effort started in 1964 with SEALAB I, launched by the U.S. Navy. Engineers built a pressurized habitat that could support a small crew for days at a time. In that first mission, four men lived for 9 days at a depth of about 192 feet off Bermuda. It proved the basic idea could work. Living at depth for days at a time changed what divers could see. Instead of brief visits, they became part of the environment. Marine life carried on around them. “You could see these animals doing things undisturbed. They sort of got used to us,” aquanaut Richard Grigg said after emerging from SEALAB I.

SEALAB I did some science, but it was mostly a proof-of-concept. It was time to ramp things up.

There’s kind of a crazy hero in all this who deserves mention, although I won’t go into too much detail about him because it would take pages, but he’s one of the more unusual figures in the history of ocean exploration. If you want the full story, Ben Hellwarth’s book Sealab: America’s Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor is excellent. I read it a few years ago, and a lot of what’s here comes from notes I took then.

That man was George Bond. Yes, Bond. George Bond.

Aquanauts eat a meal inside the Sealab II habitat. (Photo: U.S. Navy)

Bond was a Navy doctor, but also a researcher, a diver, and one of the few people willing to rethink the fundamentals of how humans operate underwater. Bond saw a flaw in traditional diving. Divers spent hours decompressing near the surface for just minutes of work. His solution was saturation diving, which in many ways was still theoretical. But the basic idea is simple: keep divers at depth for days or weeks, then decompress once at the end.

And so, after the success of SEALAB I, the next step was clear. SEALAB II.

Off San Diego, the Navy significantly scaled up what had been accomplished near Bermuda, placing a larger habitat about 205 feet below the surface on a ledge along an undersea canyon in the murky waters off La Jolla. The uneven seabed left the structure slightly tilted, enough that loose objects would slide across the floor, prompting one aquanaut to nickname it the “Tilton’ Hilton.” But compared to the cramped design of SEALAB I, the new habitat felt almost luxurious, with larger sleeping and eating areas, a dedicated lab, and even a few unexpected flourishes, including an exterior shark cage and curtains on its 11 portholes.

SEALAB 2 was sitting at the edge of a canyon that was a lot deeper than the habitat location. Since the landing site was not level, Team One nicknamed the habitat Tiltin Hilton. (Photo: U.S. Navy)

Inside, small teams of aquanauts, usually three at a time, lived under pressure for weeks, breathing a helium-oxygen mix. This was the key to saturation diving, but it had not been thoroughly tested or proven over long periods of time.

As you likely know from high school chemistry class, the air we breathe is around 78 percent nitrogen. Under pressure, nitrogen from the air dissolves into the body’s tissues. Come up too quickly, and that nitrogen forms bubbles, causing severe pain or even death. It’s known as decompression sickness, or, simply, the bends.

Saturation diving reduces that risk by replacing most of the nitrogen with helium, allowing the body’s tissues to fully saturate at depth. Helium still dissolves under pressure, but it doesn’t have the same narcotic effects as nitrogen and moves through the body much more quickly, making it easier to manage during that single decompression.

And so, from August to October 1965, three teams of aquanauts, Navy divers and civilian scientists, each spent about 15 days living 205 feet below the surface off La Jolla. They carried out research on human physiology, ocean science, and underwater operations, even working with a trained porpoise named Tuffy to test the idea of animal-assisted rescue.

Tuffy carries a diver rescue line in practice for Sealab III, September 1968.

Aquanauts also tested tools, ran experiments, and proved that saturation diving was practical. The program also explored underwater construction and the limits of human endurance in isolation.

There were real risks. Gas mix errors, equipment failures, and the constant threat of decompression sickness or oxygen toxicity were always lurking. Even small mistakes could escalate quickly at that depth. The helium-oxygen mix itself created challenges, distorting voices and making communication harder.

Scott Carpenter speaking with President Lyndon Johnson during the SEALAB II mission. (Photo: U.S Navy)

There’s a great, hilarious even, recording of Scott Carpenter speaking from the seafloor with President Lyndon B. Johnson. Breathing a helium-oxygen mix, his voice comes through high and distorted, the same way your voice sounds funny when you inhale from a helium balloon, except that it lasted for the duration of the mission.

Here it is:

Recording of Scott Carpenter inside SEALAB II speaking with President Lyndon B. Johnson, his voice altered by the helium-oxygen mix he was breathing.

SEALAB II was, in many respects, a success. It showed that humans could live and work at depth for extended periods, proved the practicality of saturation diving, and led to new insights into human physiology and long-duration isolation. Briefly, it suggested a real future in which people might live and work routinely on the ocean floor.

It also set the stage for SEALAB III in 1969, conducted off San Clemente Island, which aimed to push the concept deeper, to more than 600 feet.

But it was not to be.

In February 1969, SEALAB 3 was lowered to 610 ft (190 m) off San Clemente Island, not far from where SEALAB 2 had taken place. (Photo: U.S. Navy)

Almost immediately, SEALAB III ran into trouble. A leak contaminated the habitat’s breathing system, making it unsafe for a full crew. The Navy quickly sent divers down to investigate and repair the problem, but the risks at that depth were significantly higher than in SEALAB II. The habitat developed issues with its breathing system, and there were concerns about contamination and whether the air supply was safe.

During one of those repair dives, aquanaut Berry L. Cannon was sent down to assess the situation. His gear relied on a chemical scrubber to remove carbon dioxide from the air he was breathing, a precursor to the so-called rebreathers that are common today. At some point during the dive, the system failed, likely due to a problem with the absorbent material used to filter out CO₂. Without scrubbing, carbon dioxide builds up quickly in a closed breathing loop. The result is confusion, loss of consciousness, and death.

Berry Cannon was gone.

Aquanaut Berry Cannon, before his death on SEALAB III, works inside the Sealab II habitat as a school of fish cluster outside a viewport. (Photo: U.S. Navy)

The incident exposed just how narrow the margin for error was. At those depths, even a small equipment issue could become fatal in minutes. It also raised broader concerns about the safety of the entire operation, including whether the systems had been adequately tested under real conditions. People had also died in the space program, but for some reason, this was different.

Within weeks, SEALAB III was shut down.

As Carpenter later put it, the ocean never quite captured the public imagination the way space did. “Work in the deep water is just not as glorious a pursuit in the minds of most people as a flight to the moon,” he told CBS in 1968. “It’s a cold, dirty place, and you can’t see very far. You can’t go down and take pictures that thrill the world.”

It’s hard not to ponder what might have followed if SEALAB had continued. The idea of people living on the ocean floor is still pretty captivating. Not just for science, but also for tourism. Living in the ocean changes how you observe it. It slows things down. It lets the environment reveal itself in ways short visits using scuba never can.

There are several encouraging signs that the idea may not be entirely gone. Projects like DEEP’s Vanguard and Sentinel habitats are revisiting the concept, and could point toward a more permanent human presence on the ocean floor.

DEEP’s Vanguard subsea human habitat will provide extended access to the ocean for research, conservation, and training. The habitat provides a dry living environment for four crew for medium-duration missions of five or more days, without the need to resurface. (Photo: DEEP)

This project is new to me. I only discovered it while reporting out this article. DEEP is a British company, but they’ve been building out facilities in both the U.K. and the U.S., including a pilot deployment at Tennessee Reef in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. This is supposed to happen as early as the end of May 2026. So, wow, yeah. Pretty neat.

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Why Southern California is the Stingray Capital of the World

Round stingray off the California coast. (Photo: Cal State Long Beach Shark Lab)
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Remember that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones peers into the Well of Souls and sees the floor writhing with snakes? Well, there’s a stretch of coastline in Southern California that’s kind of like that, but the creatures moving there aren’t snakes. They’re stingrays.

Why’d it have to be stingrays? Well, there’s a reason.

Seal Beach is one of those places with a perfect mix of environmental ingredients that make it a favorite spot along the coast for these prolific, mysterious and sometimes dangerous animals.

Locals and lifeguards have a name for it: Ray Bay.

What’s crazy is not that stingrays are here (they have been for a long, long time), but how many there are. According to research led by Dr. Chris Lowe at California State University, Long Beach Shark Lab, Southern California’s nearshore waters may host one of the densest concentrations of stingrays anywhere in the world. In some surveys, patches of seafloor the size of a football field are effectively carpeted with them. “We’ve done snorkel surveys where you cannot see sand,” Lowe says.

Dr. Chris Lowe is a professor of marine biology and director of the Shark Lab at Cal State, Long Beach. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

The Shark Lab has long been the state’s premier institution for understanding the behavior of sharks and rays. Lowe, who has led the lab for nearly three decades, is tall, fit, and deeply fluent in all things elasmobranch, the group of cartilaginous fishes that includes sharks, rays, skates, and chimaeras. He has become one of California’s most recognizable voices on these animals, a steady, authoritative presence for television, news, and documentary crews trying to make sense of what’s happening just offshore.

The lab, which sits landlocked on the California State University, Long Beach campus several miles from the beach, blends indoor workspaces with outdoor holding areas, where large circular seawater tanks temporarily house sharks and rays for study. It has a rough, garage-like feel, crowded with shark paraphernalia. Dried jaws line the counters, climb the walls, and hang from the ceiling. The place feels like a mix of working lab and Quint’s weathered shack in Jaws, a space where serious science and ocean obsession sit side by side. My colleague Tod Mesirow and I recently spent a day with Dr. Lowe in the lab and learned a great deal about stingrays and why they, rather than sharks, are actually one of the most dangerous animals off the coast of California.

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Four species of stingrays live along this part of the coast, but one dominates: The round stingray. About the size of a dinner plate, the round stingray is one of the most abundant fish in Southern California’s coastal waters. Hundreds of thousands flap and burrow at wave breaks along the shore at any given moment.

And Seal Beach is, in some ways, engineered for them.

The San Gabriel River empties into the ocean at Seal Beach at a wide channel beloved by surfers. River currents deliver a steady supply of fine sediment that creates soft, sandy bottoms, ideal for burying, a common behavior of stingrays to avoid predation. There’s also a breakwater here that slows currents, allowing sediment to accumulate. Even more importantly, nearby power plants, including the Haynes Generating Station and the Alamitos Energy Center, discharge warm water into the coastal zone, raising water temperatures and helping create conditions that stingrays favor year-round. “They use all these conditions for mating and for pupping,” Lowe explains.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ed/Round_stingray.jpg/1280px-Round_stingray.jpg
Round stingray on the seafloor. (Photo: Wikipedia)

Stingrays don’t lay eggs. They give birth to live young, and the round stingray does it quickly. Gestation lasts only about three months, one of the fastest reproductive cycles among sharks and rays. Females mature in just a few years and can produce multiple litters over a lifetime of roughly 15 years. Add warming ocean temperatures, which are making Southern California even more hospitable, and you have the conditions for a major population surge. “As climate change is warming the water, it’s actually making Southern California even more appealing, and they’re going to start marching even further north,” Lowe says. Get ready, Northern California.

At the same time, another factor has led to a rise in stingray populations. For much of the 20th century, many of the stingray’s natural predators were depleted. Sea lions and seals were heavily hunted. Many have fallen to diseases like leptospirosis, a bacterial kidney affliction that causes high mortality, with over 370 confirmed cases in late 2025. Large fish like giant sea bass went into decline due to overfishing. Sharks were reduced. Without those pressures, stingray populations exploded.

That said, now, the balance may be tilting back. Slightly. Juvenile great white sharks feed heavily on stingrays. “Baby white sharks, their favorite things to eat are what we call stingray pancakes,” Lowe says. In an ecological twist, the return of white sharks may actually make beaches safer. “When there are a lot of white sharks off your beach, they’re keeping you safer because they’re eating the stingrays that are far more likely to injure people than the sharks are themselves.”

Round stingray scientific illustration.

Tough choice, right? Do you want more sharks or more stingrays? For now, the rays dominate the shallows.

Stingrays are, in many ways, perfectly designed for this life. Stingrays are part of an ancient lineage of cartilaginous fishes, closely related to sharks. Lowe sometimes calls them “flat sharks”. Their bodies are compressed, their eyes sit on top, and their mouths and gills face downward, ideal for feeding on clams, worms, and crustaceans buried in the sand.

As they feed, they reshape the environment. Stingrays suck up sediment to uncover prey, then expel it, oxygenating the seafloor and cycling nutrients. “They’re really important tillers of the soil,” Lowe says. Without them, coastal sediments could become stagnant and foul-smelling. “They help keep our beaches healthy.”

But this same behavior brings them into conflict with humans.

Stingrays bury themselves as a defense strategy, hiding from predators. It works well against sharks. It works less well against people.

“Our feet don’t have eyes,” Lowe says, and when someone steps directly on a ray’s most sensitive area, where its organs sit, it reacts instantly, and its tail snaps upward. The spine strikes into a swimmer’s ankle or foot. Ouch.

The result is one of the most common marine injuries in California.

A fake foot constructed by the Shark Lab tests how stingrays react when stepped on by real humans. “If you step on the margin of the fin or the nose, they won’t flip,” says Lowe. “They’ll wiggle away. But if you step on the organs, the most sensitive part is when they flick.” (Image: Shark Lab, CSULB)

To test how stingrays inflict pain, the Shark Lab developed a fake human foot to step on different parts of the rays. What they discovered will come as a surprise to many people: “If you step on the margin of the fin or the nose, they won’t flip,” says Lowe. “They’ll wiggle away. But if you step on the organs, the most sensitive part is when they flick.”

At Seal Beach alone, lifeguards treat up to 350 stingray injuries each year. Across Southern California, estimates suggest at least 10,000 people are treated annually, and likely more. “That is an underestimate,” Lowe notes, since many stings go unreported.

Still, there is quite a bit of data.

“Lifeguards there have been treating stingray injuries for 40 years and keeping records,” says Lowe. “We’ve been using those records to understand more about stingrays, what they do there. And that research has now made the round stingray the best studied stingray in the world.”

The sting injury itself is a mix of mechanics and chemistry. The spine is a modified scale with serrated edges. It punctures cleanly going in but tears on the way out. Venom coats the spine in a mucus, plunging into tissue and triggering intense pain that often builds over 10 to 15 minutes as it creeps up the leg.

Treatment is simple but surprisingly effective. “Hot water works like magic,” Lowe says. Immersing the wound in hot liquid breaks down the venom, easing pain. Lifeguards up and down the coast are equipped with buckets, heaters, and increasingly, portable treatment kits. Forget the whole pee on the wound thing. Urine is neither hot enough nor in any way chemically effective against stingray stings.

Infections, however, are a real concern. Roughly 25 percent of injuries can become infected, due to bacteria or debris left in the wound.

The good news is that most stings are preventable.

A tiny weapon with a serious sting — the serrated barb of a round stingray, built for defense and capable of delivering a painful reminder to watch your step in shallow coastal waters. (Photo: CSULB Shark Lab)

The simplest solution is something lifeguards repeat constantly: the stingray shuffle. Instead of stepping normally, you slide your feet along the sand, digging your toes in a bit. That motion nudges buried stingrays, giving them time to flee. “If you shuffle your feet and you nudge them, they’ll skitter away,” Lowe says.

I’ve done the stingray shuffle plenty of times wading into Southern California waters and have never been stung, which is more than Chris Lowe himself can say.

“I’ve been stung so many times. And it is painful,” Lowe says. He warns again of taking the injury seriously: “If you start to see redness and intensity, it could be some of the barb broke off, or grains of sand have gotten into the wound and are causing infection.”

Stingray warning sign for beach tourists at Seal Beach. “Do the Shuffle” to help prevent stings. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Still, Lowe says he has respect for the animals and hopes people don’t see them as creatures that are somehow out to sting us. Stingrays are not aggressive. They are defensive. “They only do that to defend themselves,” Lowe says of the sting. They’re not invading the beach. They are using a habitat that, in many ways, has been shaped to suit them. Perhaps it’s us who need to adapt. That’s the central message Lowe draws from years of studying these animals, the so-called “flat sharks.”

“By understanding more about the animal, which is our main purpose in doing science, and getting that to the public in a way that they can understand and appreciate, is changing the way they look at it. And they don’t look at them as being these animals that are out to get them or hurt them.”

Next time you step into the water at a Southern California beach, enjoy it. Just don’t forget the shuffle.

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How the Jones Act Strangles California Innovation and Keeps I-5 Packed with Trucks

A century-old law, the Jones Act, is keeping coastal shipping off the map—while traffic, costs, and emissions keep rising on land.

A Maersk container ship (and many others) sits off the California coast during Covid in 2020. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

This article is adapted from my Substack, which offers weekly articles on California. You can get 50% off a subscription with this link. It helps fund the work we do here at California Curated. These articles take a ton of work, and if you enjoy the publication, we’d be grateful to have your support.

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President Trump recently issued a temporary waiver of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, also known as the Jones Act, allowing oil to be moved on foreign-flagged vessels between US ports in an effort to ease supply constraints and lower prices. The move put a spotlight back on this century-old law that quietly shapes how goods move around the United States. Then on Sunday, 60 Minutes aired a segment examining the Jones Act itself and the decline of the U.S. maritime industry it was designed to protect. The picture it painted was not of a thriving, competitive shipbuilding sector, but of one that has been in steady decline for decades, particularly compared to the massive shipbuilding industries of places like China, Japan, and South Korea.

The topic is familiar to me. A few years ago, I reported on the Jones Act for Quartz and asked important questions about how the act impacts California. I’d like to readdress that question here because the issues I wrote about then are just as important now, if not more so.

Port of Los Angeles (Photo: Erik Olsen)

The Jones Act is protectionist. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. It was designed to shield U.S. shipbuilders and maritime operators from foreign competition, reserving domestic shipping for American-built and American-crewed vessels in the name of national security and economic self-reliance. Sadly, as 60 Minutes pointed out clearly, it has not done its job very well.

In California, the Jones Act effectively prevents the state from experimenting with something it seems perfectly built for: a “blue highway” running just offshore, moving goods between ports instead of forcing so much of it onto already traffic-clogged roads. And with congestion worsening, infrastructure under strain, and growing pressure to cut carbon emissions, it is worth looking again at how California could begin to solve several huge problems. Because if this century-old policy were rethought, or even partially reformed, California could open the door to a new era of coastal shipping and transportation innovation.

Shipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles (Photo: Erik Olsen)

California is defined by trade. Cargo arrives from across the Pacific, pours through Los Angeles and Long Beach, the largest port system in the country, it spreads into warehouses and rail yards, and then begins its second journey up and down the state. Trucks clog I-5. Trains thread through the Central Valley. The coastline, though, stretching past the state’s major population centers, remains oddly quiet.

It’s strange. One of the world’s busiest maritime regions depends overwhelmingly on highways to move goods between its own coastal cities. WTF is going on here?

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In theory, the ocean should be part of California’s domestic freight system. Ships already cross it every day carrying containers, vehicles, fuel, and raw materials from Asia. A smaller feeder vessel moving containers, automobiles, construction materials, or empty containers between Southern California and the Bay Area would be entirely ordinary by global standards.

But not in California. Or the rest of the US, for that matter.

Los Angeles traffic is some of the worst in the country. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Across Europe, short sea shipping is a core part of logistics networks. Containers arrive at major ports like Rotterdam and are redistributed by smaller feeder vessels to secondary ports rather than being hauled long distances by truck. Japan, South Korea, and China all operate extensive coastal shipping systems linking major industrial regions. In those places, the ocean functions as an extension of the transportation network, not just an international gateway.

Not here. There is no blue highway.

The problem is the Jones Act. Because foreign-built vessels cannot carry cargo between U.S. ports, the enormous potential to offload a huge portion of shipping traffic onto the sea is lost. Under the Jones Act, ships must be built in the United States, flagged here and manned entirely by US crew. The first part of that is the rub, because it is prohibitively expensive, and sometimes not even possible, to build ships here. Exactly the problem the Jones Act was supposed to solve.

So all freight stays on land.

The consequences show up everywhere. The I-5 corridor carries immense truck traffic moving containers, agricultural goods, vehicles, and construction materials between Southern California and the Bay Area. Highways wear down. Congestion builds. Supply chains slow.

In Los Angeles, drivers lose roughly 80 to more than 130 hours a year sitting in traffic. If you live here, you know we have a term for it: soul-crushing. But it also translates into real economic loss, roughly $1,500 per driver annually, and billions of dollars across the region. Statewide, congestion costs run into the tens of billions when lost time, fuel, and freight delays are combined.

Trucks are a huge part of the problem. They burn fuel in traffic. They wear down infrastructure. Sure, they move goods efficiently door to door, but at scale they add to the strain.

And yet, just offshore, there is another option.

Port of Los Angeles. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Marine transport is significantly more energy efficient per ton-mile than trucking. Even modest coastal shipping could remove thousands of truck trips, reduce emissions, and add redundancy when rail lines shut down or highways close due to wildfire or accidents. The coastline offers a ready-made corridor that requires no new pavement.

Studies have repeatedly pointed to the benefits. A West Coast marine highway analysis identified the Los Angeles to Oakland route as one of the most promising coastal shipping corridors, currently entirely unused. Another assessment estimated that even at 10 percent market penetration, coastal shipping between Southern California and the Bay Area could divert more than 2,500 truckloads per day in each direction.

But not with the Jones Act.

Its defenders argue that it protects national security and maritime jobs. Those concerns are real. But the results after almost 100 years show that at least as far as jobs are concerned, that ahem, ship has sailed. The United States today builds only a tiny fraction of the world’s commercial ships, far behind China, South Korea, and Japan. The number of large U.S.-flagged vessels has diminished to almost nothing, as the 60 Minutes piece pointed out. American shipping is already in rapid decline and there’s very little that can be done to solve the problem.

Critics have pointed this out for years. John McCain called the law “protectionism at its worst,” arguing that it distorted markets without achieving its goals. Analysts across the political spectrum have made similar arguments, pointing to higher shipping costs and limited competition in domestic maritime markets.

Workers observe a propeller installation for USS Nimitz at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility in Bremerton, Washington, October 16, 2018. Photo by Brian Kilpatrick/U.S. Navy

In places that depend heavily on ocean shipping, the impacts are even more direct. Bringing goods to and from Hawaii, for example, is dominated by a small number of carriers, including Matson. That’s why even basic goods in Hawaii like milk, eggs, and fuel are often 20–50% higher than on the mainland, reflecting both shipping costs and the lack of competitive alternatives.

In California, the impact shows up as heavy traffic, more pollution, and degraded infrastructure. But there are even more opportunities lost. Imagine being able to take a ferry from San Diego to LA. Or LA to San Francisco. Or San Diego to Seattle. A cruise ship, perhaps? A slow-ish energy-efficient cruise ship that goes up the whole West Coast for retirees wanting to experience the glorious West Coast. How cool would that be? Alas, too bad. I mean, a ferry between Los Angeles and San Francisco isn’t prohibited in theory. But it would have to use a US-built vessel. That makes it prohibitively more expensive to launch than similar services in Europe or Asia, where operators can purchase vessels from a global market.

Entrepreneurs have tried to make this work before. When I first reported this story, there were even claims that British businessman Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, had explored a high-speed coastal ferry capable of making the Los Angeles to San Francisco trip in eight to ten hours. Whether or not that specific plan ever fully materialized, the broader idea has surfaced repeatedly. Others have tried and failed. It has never taken hold, in large part because of the economics shaped by the Jones Act.

The Jones Act does not ban coastal shipping. It makes it difficult enough that it rarely happens at scale. Even today, proposals like a Santa Monica–Malibu “Blue Highway” ferry are still in early stages, facing the same cost and feasibility challenges. The ship would be Jones Act compliant. It’s hard not to wonder how much bigger, faster, and more ambitious these projects could be if operators were allowed to buy vessels on the global market.

A ferry similar to this one might serve Marina del Rey, Santa Monica and Malibu. A partnership called Pier to Pier says passengers will experience a faster, more peaceful trip on the ocean, rather than contending with PCH and the 405 Freeway. The company hopes to launch service this year. (Pier to Pier)

So what can be done? One place to start is the most restrictive piece of the law: the U.S.-build requirement. Allowing foreign-built, U.S.-flagged vessels to operate in domestic trade and human transport would immediately expand the pool of ships and lower the cost of entry, making it possible to test routes that today never get off the ground. Or sea.

We’re constantly searching for ways to reduce congestion, cut emissions, and extend the life of infrastructure that’s falling apart. Yeah, we’re investing in rail, and some of it is doing a great job, although the California High-Speed rail project is currently a costly disaster. All the while, one of the most obvious transportation corridors remains largely unused.

So, a century-old law, passed in a very different era, continues to shape how goods move through the 4th largest economy in the world. Why? The coastline is there. The cargo is there. The need is there.

The question is whether the policy will ever catch up.

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The Man Who Saved the Owens Pupfish

How biologist Phil Pister helped rescue a species that had nearly disappeared

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This is a happy story, but first we need to get through the downer stuff:

The news is full of extinction stories. A species that once thrived runs headlong into the modern world and vanishes. Habitat disappears, invasive species arrive, ecosystems unravel, and before long another name is added to the list of things that used to exist.

The numbers are grim. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List reports that about 900 species have gone extinct since the year 1500, the baseline used for “modern extinctions.” Further, more than 48,600 species are threatened with extinction; that’s about 28% of all assessed species. Many believe we are living through the Anthropocene, a period in which human activity has become the dominant force shaping the planet. For many plants and animals, it is an era they simply cannot survive.

Elizabeth Kolbert captured the scale of the problem in her book The Sixth Extinction. I’ve read it. It’s great, if depressing.

But every so often, there are stories that tick in the other direction. Small victories. Species that somehow slip through the cracks and hang on.

Amanda Royal over at Earth Hope does a wonderful job documenting some of those rare moments of recovery. And there are more of them than you might think if you look closely.

One of them begins in the high desert of California’s Eastern Sierra, with a fish no longer than your finger.

The Owens pupfish.

Its story is not a sweeping comeback. The species is still endangered and survives only in a few carefully protected places. But its survival came down to the actions of a handful of people and, in one crucial moment, the determination of a single biologist who refused to let an entire lineage disappear.

Sometimes that is all it takes to change the ending.

Less than 2.5 inches in length, the Owens pupfish is a silvery-blue fish in the family Cyprinodontidae, part of a group of small egg-laying fishes that includes killifish and topminnows. Endemic to California’s Owens Valley, 200 miles north of Los Angeles, the fish has lived on the planet since the Pleistocene, becoming a new species when its habitat was divided by changing climatic conditions, 60,000 years ago. The fish is a survivor. But of course, as is too often the case, when man comes along, even the most hardened creatures face peril.

Owens pupfish (California Department of Fish and Wildlife)

For thousands of years, the Owens Valley was largely filled with water, crystal-clear snowmelt that still streams off the jagged, precipitous slab faces of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Pupfish were common, with nine species populating various lakes and streams from Death Valley to an area just south of Mammoth Lakes. The Paiute people scooped them out of the water and dried them for the winter.

In the late 19th century, Los Angeles was a rapidly growing young metropolis, still in throes of growing pains that would last decades. While considered an ugly younger sibling to the city of San Francisco, Los Angeles had the appeal of near year-round sunshine and sandy beaches whose beauty that rivaled those of the French Riviera. And still do.

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But by the late 1900s, the city began outgrowing its water supply. Fred Eaton, mayor of Los Angeles, and his water czar, William Mulholland, hatched a plan to build an aqueduct from Owens Valley to Los Angeles. Most Californians know the story. Through a series of shady deals, Mulholland and Eaton managed to get control of the water in the Owens Valley and, in 1913, the aqueduct was finished. It was great news for the new city, but terrible news for many of the creatures (not to mention the farmers) who depended on the water flowing into and from the Owens Lake to survive.

So named because they exhibit playful, puppy-like behavior, the Owens pupfish rapidly began to disappear. Pupfish are well-known among scientists for being able to live in extreme and isolated situations. They can tolerate high levels of salinity. Some live in water that exceeds 100° Fahrenheit, and they can even tolerate up to 113° degrees for short periods. They are also known to survive in near-freezing temperatures common in the lower desert.

Owens River in the Eastern Sierra (Erik Olsen)

But hot or cold are one thing. The disappearance of water altogether is another.

As California has developed, and as climate change has caused temperatures to rise, thus increasing evaporation, all of California’s pupfish populations have come under stress. Add to these conditions, the early 20th-century introduction by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife of exotic species like largemouth bass and rainbow trout to lakes and streams in the eastern Sierras (bass and trout readily prey on small fish), and you get a recipe for disaster. And disaster is exactly what happened.

Several species of pupfish in the state have been put on the endangered species list. Several species, including the Owens pupfish, the Death Valley Pupfish and the Devils Hole pupfish are some of the rarest species of fish on the planet. The Devils Hole pupfish recently played the lead role in a recent (and excellent) story about a man who accidentally killed one of the fish during a drunken spree. According to news stories, he stomped on the fish when he tried to swim in a fenced-off pool in Death Valley National Park. He went to jail.

The remains of the Owens River flowing through Owens Valley in California. Credit: Erik Olsen

The impact on the Owens pupfish habitat was so severe that in 1948, just after it was scientifically described, it was declared extinct.

That is, until one day in 1964, when researchers discovered a remnant population of Owens pupfish in a desert marshland called Fish Slough, a few miles from Bishop, California. Wildlife officials immediately began a rescue mission to save the fish and reintroduce them into what were considered suitable habitats. Many were not saved, and by the late 1960s, the only remaining population of Owens pupfish, about 800 individuals, barely hung on in a “room-sized” pond near Bishop.

On August 18, 1969, a series of heavy rains caused foliage to grow and clog the inflow of water into the small pool. It happened so quickly, that when scientists learned of the problem, they realized they had just hours to save the fish from extinction.

Edwin Philip Pister
Edwin Philip Pister

Among the scientists who came to the rescue that day was a stocky, irascible 40-year-old fish biologist named Phil Pister. Pister had worked for the California Department of Fish and Game (now the California Department of Fish and Wildlife) most of his career. An ardent acolyte of Aldo Leopold, regarded as one of the fathers of American conservation, Pister valued nature on par, or even above, human needs. As the Los Angeles Times put it in a 1990 profile, “The prospect of Pister off the leash was fearsome.”

“I was born on January 15, 1929, the same day as Martin Luther King—perhaps this was a good day for rebels,” he once said.

Because of his temperament, Pister had few friends among his fellow scientists. He was argumentative, disagreeable, and wildly passionate about the protection of California’s abundant, but diminishing, natural resources.

Pister realized that immediate action was required to prevent the permanent loss of the Owens pupfish. He rallied several of his underlings and rushed to the disappearing pool with buckets, nets, and aerators.

Within a few hours, the small team was able to capture the entire remaining population of Owens pupfish in two buckets, transporting them to a nearby wetland. However, as Pister himself recalls in an article for Natural History Magazine:

“In our haste to rescue the fish, we had unwisely placed the cages in eddies away from the influence of the main current. Reduced water velocity and accompanying low dissolved oxygen were rapidly taking their toll.”

Los Angeles Aqueduct. Credit: Erik Olsen

As noted earlier, pupfish are amazingly tolerant of extreme conditions, but like many species, they can also be fragile, and within a short amount of time, many of the pupfish Pister had rescued were dying, floating belly up in the cages. Pister realized immediate action was required, lest the species disappear from the planet forever. Working alone, he managed to net the remaining live fish into the buckets and then carefully carried them by foot across an expanse of marsh. “I realized that I literally held within my hands the existence of an entire vertebrate species,” he wrote. “I remember mumbling something like: “Please don’t let me stumble. If I drop these buckets we won’t have another chance!”

Pister managed to get the fish into cool, moving water where they could breathe and move about. He says about half the the population survived, but that was enough.

Pister died in 2023 near Bishop, and today, the Owens pupfish remains in serious danger of extinction. On several occasions over the last few decades, the Owens pupfish have suffered losses by largemouth bass that find their way into the pupfish’s refuges, likely due to illegal releases by anglers.

Today the Owens pupfish hangs on in a small constellation of protected springs and marshes in the Owens Valley. The largest populations in Fish Slough may number in the thousands, but altogether the species occupies only a few acres of habitat. In 2021, biologists even created a new refuge population to give the fish another chance.

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MBARI and the Machines That Let Us See the Deep 

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, California (Photo: Erik Olsen)

You’ve probably seen the videos. A fish with a transparent head, its organs floating inside like tennis balls. Squid drifting through the darkness with enormous, googly eyes and arms trailing behind them like ribbons. These strange animals are just a glimpse of what scientists are beginning to learn about the deep ocean off California. Much of that discovery is happening at one of the most remarkable ocean research institutions in the world, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

The California coastline is about 840 miles long, pretty huge. That means lots of ocean at our doorstep. Most of us know the beaches, the cliffs, the kelp forests close to shore, the places where water crashes on the sand. But once you head offshore, knowledge thins out fast. Just a mile from the coast, we know so little. 

California’s state waters extend three nautical miles from the coast, after which federal waters take over, and the United States’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ) stretches all the way out to 200 nautical miles. That is an enormous expanse of ocean, larger than the land area of the state itself. 

And here’s the thing: Much of it remains barely explored, especially at depth, where light disappears, pressure is crushing, and the ocean floor drops into canyons almost as deep as the Grand Canyon. Just to put things into perspective: the maximum depth for a scuba diver is about 60-100 feet. The average depth of the ocean is around 12,000 feet. 

Simulated image of Monterey Submarine Canyon, based on detailed bathymetric data, combined with satellite imagery of the Central California coast. (Credit: © 1999 MBARI, satellite image provided by Space Imaging)

California, then, not surprisingly, is home to some of the world’s most important ocean science institutions. Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego has shaped modern oceanography for more than a century, from plate tectonics to climate science. We’ve done several stories on Scripps and some of the key figures there. Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station has been a center of marine biology since the nineteenth century. There are others too, from university labs to federal research centers, each with its own focus and institutional agenda.

But one organization stands apart, not because it replaces these institutions, but because it operates under a fundamentally different model. That institution is the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, better known as MBARI. 

I’ve been to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute many times to film stories both about and for them, and it always blows me away. It’s less like a stodgy research campus and more like a playground for ocean exploration. There’s a massive testing tank where engineers trial the robots and instruments destined for the deep, and sprawling, well-equipped labs that could be featured in science fiction films. 

A barreleye fish (Macropinna microstoma) observed by MBARI’s remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Ventana in Monterey Bay at a depth of approximately 740 meters. (Credit: © 2004 MBARI)

The people are exceptionally smart, deeply focused, and totally serious about the work. MBARI is one of the few places on the California coast where you can actually see the future of ocean exploration being built.

That’s why I’m writing this. I want you to understand how remarkable MBARI is, and how vast, fragile, and important California’s offshore ecosystem really is.

While closely linked, the Monterey Bay Aquarium (est. 1984) and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (est. 1987) are distinct entities. The Aquarium serves as a public gateway for education and conservation, while MBARI operates as an independent, offshore science and engineering hub. If you are in Monterey, the Aquarium is a must-see destination for world-class exhibits.

So, MBARI

Interestingly, MBARI is not affiliated with a California university. That independence frees it from the layers of academic bureaucracy that often shape university-based research. MBARI can move faster, take longer-term bets, and organize its work around problems and tools rather than semesters, committees, or funding cycles. Also, MBARI is intentionally engineering-driven. It brings engineers and scientists together to build tools that work in the ocean, solving practical problems and opening up parts of the deep sea that were previously out of reach, including the places abundant with bizarre life.

A black seadevil anglerfish (Melanocetus johnsonii) observed by MBARI’s remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Doc Ricketts in Monterey Canyon at a depth of approximately 570 meters. (Credit: © 2014 MBARI)

MBARI was founded in 1987 by David Packard, the cofounder of Hewlett-Packard, and from the start it was designed to solve a problem Packard thought was holding ocean science back. Too often, scientists depended on tools they didn’t control, ships they couldn’t easily schedule, and technologies that required specific expertise. MBARI brought scientists, engineers, and marine operations together inside a single institution, with a mandate not just to do science, but to invent the tools needed to do better science. Packard himself was a gruff, no-nonsense engineer who had a deep passion for the ocean, and he formed MBARI with clear goals in mind, focused on designing and building machines to do ocean work. Why? Because the ocean is a remarkably difficult place to get things done. 

Testing tank at MBARI. Engineers and scientists trial new underwater robots and instruments before sending them thousands of meters into the ocean. The massive facility holds hundreds of thousands of gallons of seawater and serves as a proving ground for many of MBARI’s most important technologies. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

I won’t get into the weeds here, but one thing that makes MBARI unusual is how it’s funded. MBARI is largely supported by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Most oceanographic institutions depend heavily on competitive federal grants to keep their core programs operational. MBARI still receives those grants, but its base budget comes from philanthropy. That difference means MBARI can think in decades instead of grant cycles. The institute can develop long-term observing programs and keep improving as technology advances.

Because of all this, they have to some extent escaped some of the harsh funding pressures under the Trump Administration that have negatively impacted other oceanographic institutions in the US, particularly at agencies like NOAA and the National Science Foundation. Many university labs and federal programs faced delays, uncertainty, or serious reductions. MBARI, while not totally immune to these disruptions, was able to weather our current period better than most. 


A vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) observed by MBARI’s remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Tiburon in the outer Monterey Canyon at a depth of approximately 770 meters. (Credit: © 2004 MBARI)

Perhaps the most important thing about MBARI is its geography. The institute was intentionally located in Moss Landing, right where Monterey Canyon, one of the largest submarine canyons in the world (here’s a vid I did for SciAm), slices deeply into the continental shelf and comes ashore. Within a few miles of the harbor, the seafloor drops to depths of more than two miles, creating an incredible natural laboratory. By placing MBARI at the canyon’s edge, deep-sea exploration became routine rather than occasional, with one of the earth’s most interesting and poorly understood features right on their doorstep.

Monterey Canyon is MBARI’s proving ground. For decades, MBARI’s remotely operated vehicles and autonomous systems have constantly descended into the canyon, mapping its walls, sampling its sediments, and documenting the life that thrives in the depths. Because the canyon is so accessible, MBARI has been able to return to the same sites again and again, building one of the most detailed, long-term records of a submarine canyon anywhere in the world. They also recently got a new research ship called the David Packard. 

For decades, Bruce Robison of Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has explored the ocean’s midwater realm, documenting fragile animals and behaviors that were once completely unknown to science. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Several legendary scientists have called MBARI home, helping us better understand what is really happening in the ocean. One of them is Bruce Robison, whom I interviewed a few years ago about a remarkable semi-autonomous system called MESOBOT, developed by MBARI and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

MESOBOT can quietly hover in the water column during the nightly movement known as Diel Vertical Migration, the largest animal migration on Earth (I wrote about it). By drifting with a vast upward and downward movement of life, the robot can capture images and behaviors that were previously impossible to document over long periods of time.

“Not only will we be able to address the questions that we have imagined beforehand,” said Robison. “But once we realize what this vehicle will do for us, there will be all sorts of new questions, new discoveries that sort of fall in your lap, in addition to what you set out to do in the first place.”

Screenshot from an MBARI video about Station M, a long-term ocean laboratory located 4,000 meters deep off the coast of Santa Barbara, where scientists have been collecting continuous data on deep-sea carbon cycling for more than three decades. (MBARI YouTube)

MBARI’s greatness stems from the complicated tools it has built. Its remotely operated vehicles, including the deep-diving Doc Ricketts (Steinbeck’s scientific muse), have transformed how scientists observe and sample sealife thousands of meters below the surface. These are workhorse platforms capable of precise, repeatable science, from collecting fragile jellyfish to mapping hydrothermal vents.

MBARI has also been a pioneer in autonomous underwater vehicles, including the Long-Range AUV (LRAUV. These robotic submarines can stay at sea for weeks or even months, sometimes traveling more than a thousand kilometers while carrying chemical, biological, and acoustic sensors. They’re roaming laboratories, quietly sampling the water column across broad stretches of ocean without the constant need for a support ship overhead.

Also important are MBARI’s observing systems. The institute operates cabled seafloor observatories like the MARS that monitor the deep sea in real time. There’s also Station M, MBARI’s long-term deep-sea laboratory off the coast of Santa Barbara. It operates at a depth of 4000m (around 13,000 feet) where decades of continuous measurements and observations track carbon sequestration in the deep ocean. 

A woolly siphonophore (Apolemia lanosa) observed by MBARI’s remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Tiburon in the outer Monterey Canyon at a depth of 1,200 meters. (Credit: © 2007 MBARI)

And there are many more projects at MBARI that help us better understand what’s going on in the ocean at a time when it’s critical to know how the ocean and the climate interact. Covering them all would take tens of thousands of words. One great source for what MBARI does is it’s exceptional annual report, which is filled with easy to digest facts, figures, articles as well as stunning images that give an update on the institution’s work. 

Yes, the imagery. I mean, wow. Over decades of work, they’ve built an incredible visual record of life just offshore. Odd creatures shaped by crushing pressure and darkness that could be in a James Cameron film. MBARI’s social media group does excellent work showcasing some of these animals. For example, they just recently released this video of a baby glass squid.

MBARI’s exceptional annual report is filled with easy to digest facts, figures, articles as well as stunning images that give an update on the institution’s work. 

One final project worth mentioning is the AI-driven FathomNet, developed by the scientist-engineer Kakani Katija. Built to tackle the flood of imagery coming off MBARI’s deep-sea dives, some of it decades old, FathomNet uses deep-learning computer-vision algorithms to help automatically identify, label, and catalog animals. The project is turning thousands of hours of video into usable biological data that helps us better understand both the diversity and quantity of life in the ocean. 

“We’re sitting on a lot of data. But we haven’t created a mechanism to share it or review it across the community,” Kakani told me. “FathomNet is really about creating the data backbone that will enable discovery across the entire ocean.”

Screenshot from FathomNet video used to identify deep sea animals using AI and machine learning. (MBARI/YouTube)

MBARI’s wasn’t built to replace universities or federal agencies. University scientists frequently collaborate with MBARI. They use its platforms and give students real in situ experience. At a moment when public funding for climate and ocean science has taken gnarly hits, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute’s philanthropic model has quietly kept the ships going to sea and the robots going down.

California’s future is connected to the ocean. Climate change, fisheries, sea level rise, and compromised ecosystems are all things the organization deals with. My guess is that few people are even aware the MBARI exists, let alone the important work it does that helps all of us. In the deep, dark places offshore, where maps are still incomplete and life thrives, MBARI has quietly become one of the most important windows we have into the largest part of the state we almost never see.

Curiosity Is the Point

Diving and filming beneath one of California’s oil rigs. (Photo: Kyle McBurnie)
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If you’ve recently encountered this Website, welcome. I hope you find something here that feeds your interests and gives you a reason to look a little more closely at the world around you. And if you’ve been here for a while, I’m genuinely grateful you’ve stuck around. What a few years ago as a passion project has slowly turned into something closer to an obsession. It felt like a good moment to pause and explain what this is really about. If I had to choose one or two words, it would be curiosity…and ignorance.

If you spend enough time outside in California, you start to realize how much you don’t know.

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I often hike in the San Gabriels or the Sierra and see a bird flash across my field of view and think, “What was that?” (California has more bird species recorded than any other U.S. state.) I’ll read about a strange fish or see a magnificent one on a dive, or more likely an invertebrate, and wonder how it avoids predators, what it eats, and how it moves through its environment.

Even driving through the state has its moments of awe that might otherwise seem mundane. How often do you pass along a highway and notice the massive roadcuts carved into hillsides, without realizing they are a goldmine for geologists trying to decode California’s distant past?

A roadcut in California’s San Gabriel Mountains. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

On a four-day hike in Yosemite a few years ago, I found myself wondering where all the granite that forms those magnificent domes actually came from. It turns out the answer is far more interesting than I expected.

The more you look around in California, the more you realize there is almost always something fascinating to notice and something worth learning a little more about.

As a longtime journalist who has reported from dozens of places around the world, including Antarctica, Micronesia, Ukraine, Haiti, Indonesia, and much of Europe, I’ve often found that my birthplace holds some of the most fascinating stories.

Filming during an expedition to summit Mt. Whitney for The New York Times. (Photo: Heidi Schumann for the New York Times.)

There’s a real joy in living somewhere so rich in natural beauty and ecological complexity, and in being able to pause, maybe pull out your phone, snap a photo, record a bird call, or look something up and start learning. If there’s one thread that has followed me throughout my life, even while living in many other places, it’s the sense that the world is filled with wonder, and that paying attention to it, learning from it, and staying curious about it is one of the things that makes life feel most meaningful.

California Curated grew out of that kind of crazy restlessness.

California feels like a living laboratory. The Sierra Nevada rise as a tilted slice of Earth’s crust, revealing granites that formed in fiery violence miles beneath the surface. The San Gabriels are growing a tiny, tiny bit each day as movement along the San Andreas system shears the landscape. Parts of today’s deserts were once seafloor, and the Central Valley held vast inland waters. The geology alone tells stories on a scale that is hard to fathom.

Monterey Canyon cuts into the continental shelf and descends more than 3,000 meters, forming one of the largest submarine canyons in North America. (MBARI)

And then there is the coast. California has roughly 840 miles of shoreline, and just offshore the seafloor drops away into one of the most extraordinary underwater landscapes on the planet. Monterey Canyon cuts into the continental shelf and descends more than 3,000 meters, forming one of the largest submarine canyons in North America. Because it begins so close to land, it has become a natural laboratory for ocean science. Institutions like Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Scripps Institution of Oceanography have spent decades studying the life and physics of these waters, leading to a much better understanding of how climate change is affecting the seas.

I’ve had the privilege of joining several major ocean expeditions around the world, including a submersible dive to more than 2,000 feet, as well as watching robotic vehicles descend into the twilight zone. On an expedition near Kiribati, I was one of the first people ever to witness a glass octopus floating like an alien in space. Experiences like these make it clear just how much of the deep ocean remains unknown. Few places, too, is that more true than off our own coast.

Glass octopus in the Phoenix Islands (Photo: Schmidt Ocean)

In the high Eastern Sierra, there is a supervolcano, a caldera, that once unleashed massive eruptions, blanketing much of the West in ash and reshaping the landscape we see today. You can not only still see its remnants up there, but you can luxuriate in hot springs that are heated by the same lingering geothermal energy beneath the surface. What could be better than being out in a place like that, and also understanding a little more about what you’re experiencing while you’re there?

That tension between wonder and ignorance is what drives this project.

Long Valley Caldera in the Eastern Sierra. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

California is rich in scientific discovery. Our universities are world-class. Our scientists and researchers are awash in Nobel prizes. California scientists have long shaped global conversations about health, biology, chemistry, physics, and on and on. Yet much of this work remains abstract, locked behind the expensive paywalls of scientific journals or lost in headlines that never quite connect back to the landscapes around us.

California Curated exists to close that gap.

The goal is not just to provide answers, but to make you look around differently. To give you enough context that the next time you hike a ridge, paddle a bay, or walk along a beach, you see a little more than before. Where does all that sand come from anyway? To spark the kind of curiosity that leads you to ask your own questions and even to seek your own answers.

I really don’t cover politics. I spent a few years doing that at ABC News in New York and quickly realized it wasn’t for me. Much of what fills our information feeds today is meant to provoke fear, anger, or to deliver a quick burst of dopamine, but it’s so often transient, fleeting, disposable. That isn’t what California Curated is about. I research and write these stories with the hope that they remain just as interesting and meaningful ten years from now as they are today.

Burned sequoias. (Photo: Finley Olsen)

Every story begins with something small, a sighting, a conversation, an otherwise tangential paragraph in a bigger story, a nagging thought. From there, I get to dig in, read papers, call scientists, visit sites, and try to condense a complicated tumult of information into something more singular and compelling. It is a privilege to do that work. It’s fun.

That is what California Curated is about. Paying attention. Following the questions. And sharing what we find.

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The Valley That Feeds a Nation

How tectonics, sediment, and water created one of the most productive landscapes on Earth.

Aerial view of California’s Central Valley, where Interstate 5 slices through a vast patchwork of irrigated fields, some of the most productive farmland on Earth, shaped by deep alluvial soils and Sierra Nevada snowmelt. (Photo: Erik Olsen)
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I love California’s bizarre, complicated geology. For many years, I had a wonderful raised-relief map of the state on my wall made by Hubbard Scientific (it hangs on my son’s bedroom wall today). On the map, color and molded plastic contours reveal the state’s diverse and often startling geological formations. I loved staring at it, touching it, imagining how those landscapes came to be over geologic time.

There is so much going on here geologically compared to almost any other state that geologists often describe California as one of the best natural laboratories on Earth, a place so rich and varied that entire careers have been built trying to understand how all its pieces fit together. As the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) puts it, nearly every major force that shapes the Earth’s crust is visible here, from plate collision and volcanism to basin formation and mountain uplift. Some of my favorite writers, like John McPhee, have described California as a collage of geological fragments, assembled piece by piece over deep time, in a way that more closely resembles an entire continent than a single region.

But when we think about California’s geology, most of us probably imagine the Sierra Nevada’s towering granite peaks, the pent-up force of the San Andreas Fault, or the fact that Lassen Peak is still an active volcano. Those places grab our attention. Yet when it comes to a geological feature that has quietly shaped daily life in California more than almost any other, we should consider the Central Valley, arguably the state’s most important geological masterpiece.

Topographical and irrigation map of the Great Central Valley of California: embracing the Sacramento, San Joaquin, Tulare and Kern Valleys and the bordering foothills (Source: NYPL Digital Collection)

Sure, the valley is flat as a tabletop, stretching out for mile after mile as you drive Interstate 5 or Highway 99 (one of my favorites), but once you consider how it formed and what lies beneath the surface, the Central Valley reveals itself as a truly remarkable place on the planet, another superlative in our state, which, of course, is already full of them.

The Central Valley was formed when tectonic forces lowered a broad swath of California’s crust between the rising Sierra Nevada to the east and the Coast Ranges to the west, creating a long, subsiding basin that slowly filled with sediment eroded from those mountains over millions of years. For thousands of years, the southern end of the valley was dominated by Lake Tulare, a mega-freshwater lake that was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. You might remember that just a few years ago, Lake Tulare briefly reappeared after a series of powerful atmospheric river storms. I went up there and flew my drone because I was working on a story about the construction of California’s long-troubled high-speed rail, which had halted construction because of the new old lake.

Lake Tulare reemerges in the southern San Joaquin Valley after powerful winter storms, flooding roads and farmland and briefly restoring the historic inland lake that once dominated this basin. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

On the other side in the west, the Coast Ranges rise up, hemming in the valley and basically holding it in place, forming something like a gigantic, hundreds-of-miles-long bathtub. One popular Instagrammer commented that it looks as if someone used a huge ice cream scoop to dig out the valley. As the surrounding mountains continued to rise, rain, snowmelt, and wind carried untold tons of silt and sediment downslope, steadily depositing them into this enormous basin over millions of years.

This process created what geologists call the Great Valley Sequence, a staggering accumulation of sedimentary material that, in some western portions of the basin, reaches a depth of 20,000 meters, or approximately 66,000 feet. Ten MILES.

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This long, slow process produced what geologists call the Great Valley Sequence, an immense stack of sedimentary rock built up over tens of millions of years as the basin steadily subsided and filled. In some western portions of the valley, that accumulated package reaches a depth of 20,000 meters in thickness, about 66,000 feet, or close to ten miles of layered geological history lying beneath the surface. That’s kind of mind-blowing.

Endless rows of pistachio orchards stretch across the Central Valley at dusk, a geometric testament to the deep soils and engineered water systems that have turned this ancient basin into one of the world’s great agricultural landscapes. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

It’s not just “dirt”; it’s a ridiculously deep, nutrient-rich record of California’s geologic history. There are the remains of trillions of diatoms, or microscopic plankton, whose organic remains were crushed into oil shales that are home to significant petroleum deposits. During the late Pleistocene and into the Holocene, the southern end of the valley was dominated by Lake Tulare, mentioned above, a vast freshwater lake that in wet periods spread across 600 to 800 square miles, making it the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. As the water evaporated and drained, the valley floor became exceptionally flat, similar to what we see today.

Most valleys are narrow corridors carved by a single river, but the Central Valley is a vast, enclosed catchment shaped by many rivers, trapping minerals and sediments from surrounding mountains rather than letting them wash quickly out to sea. This mix created near-ideal conditions for agriculture. For the uninitiated, the Central Valley is typically divided into two major sections: the northern third, known as the Sacramento Valley, and the southern two-thirds, known as the San Joaquin Valley. That lower region can be further broken down into the San Joaquin Basin to the north and the Tulare Basin to the south.

Relief map of California showing the Central Valley standing out as a wide, uninterrupted green swath between the rugged Sierra Nevada and the Coast Ranges, its flat, low-lying basin sharply contrasting with the surrounding mountains that frame and define it.

Today, because of all that fertility, the Central Valley is one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, growing over 230 different crops. It produces roughly a quarter of the nation’s food by value, supplies about 40 percent of U.S. fruits, nuts, and vegetables, and dominates global markets for crops like almonds, pistachios, strawberries, tomatoes, and table grapes. Truly a global breadbasket.

Of course, none of this would have been possible without water. The real turning point in California’s story was learning how to capture it, move it, and store it. From mountain snowpack to canals and reservoirs, controlling water has been the quiet engine behind much of the state’s success. When human engineering intervened in the 20th century through the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project, it essentially redirected a geological process that was already in place, replacing seasonal floods and ancient lakes with a controlled system of dams and canals.

Roadside cutout farmer holding bright green heads of lettuce at the edge of a Central Valley field, a playful nod to the region’s identity as one of the most productive agricultural landscapes in the world. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Alas, this productivity is not without geological limits, and we’ve done a pretty good job over-exploiting the valley’s resources, particularly groundwater, to achieve these things. The same porous sediments that store our life-giving groundwater are susceptible to compaction. In parts of the San Joaquin Valley, excessive pumping has caused the land to subside, sinking by as much as 28 feet in some locations, causing the soil to crack and the landscape to physically lower as the water is withdrawn. How we deal with that is a whole other story. Recent storms have helped California’s water supply tremendously, but the state seems destined to remain in a permanently precarious state of drought.

But when you talk geology, you talk deep time. You talk about eons and erosion, mountain ranges that rise and are slowly worn down, sometimes leaving behind something as breathtaking as the granite domes of Yosemite.Against that scale, the Central Valley can seem almost plain, but as I hope I’ve made the case here, when you look a little closer at even the most mundane things, you realize there is magnificence there, and few places on this planet are as magnificent as the state of California.

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