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)

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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?

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.

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.

Celebrate California’s wild side with our beautifully illustrated wildlife mugs, featuring the state’s most iconic birds and animals. Visit our store and bring a little piece of California nature to your morning coffee.

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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California’s Daily Tidal Wave of Life

A lobate ctenophore in the ocean twilight zone. (Photo: NOAA)
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If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you already know I’m obsessed with submarines and undersea life. I believe we’re at the beginning of a new era of ocean discovery, driven by small personal submersibles, remotely operated vehicles (ROVS), and autonomous explorers (AUVs) that can roam the deep on their own. Add AI into the mix, and our ability to see, map, and understand the ocean is about to expand dramatically.

One phenomenon we are only beginning to fully understand also happens to be one of the most extraordinary animal events on Earth. It unfolds every single night, just a few miles offshore, in a region known as the ocean twilight zone about 650 to 3,300 feet below the ocean surface. Twice a day, billions of tons of marine organisms, from tiny crustaceans to massive schools of squid, traverse the water column in what researchers call the Diel Vertical Migration (DVM), the largest mass migration of animals on Earth. A heaving, planetary-scale pulse of biomass rising and falling through the dark.

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It happens everywhere, in every ocean. But California is special for several reasons. California’s cold, southward-flowing current and seasonal upwelling flood coastal waters with nutrients that feed dense plankton blooms. These blooms provide food for thick layers of migrating animals. California has one of the most robust and productive ocean ecosystems on the planet. (Take a read of the piece I did about life on some of our oil rigs.) When you add Monterey Canyon into the mix, which funnels and concentrates life, this global phenomenon becomes more compressed and visible. In fact, with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) based at Moss Landing near the head of the canyon, Monterey Bay has become one of the most intensively studied midwater ecosystems on the planet.

Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Moss Landing, perched at the edge of Monterey Canyon, one of the deepest submarine canyons in North America. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

This “tidal cycle of shifting biomass” is not driven by gravity, but by the rising and setting sun. Animals rise by the trillions during the evening to escape predation, then settle during the day, when light would otherwise make them visible to hungry predators.

The discovery of this phenomenon reads like a Tom Clancy novel and took place just off our coast. During World War II, U.S. Navy sonar operators working off San Diego and the Southern California Bight began detecting what looked like a “false seafloor” hovering 300 to 500 meters down during the day, only to sink or vanish each night. The mystery lingered for years, until the late 1940s, when scientist Martin Johnson and others at Scripps Institution of Oceanography showed that the phantom bottom was not seafloor, but vast layers of living animals rising and falling with the sun. We now know this as the Deep Scattering Layer (DSL), so named because the gas-filled swim bladders of millions of small fish, primarily lanternfish which number into the quadrillions around the globe, reflect sonar pings like a solid wall.

The deep-scattering layer (DSL) graphed as an echogram, or a plot of active acoustic data. Warmer colors indicate more backscatter, meaning that more (or stronger) echoes were received back from the organisms at that depth. The red line indicates the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) trajectory as it performs transects throughout the layer. (Source: NOAA)

So let’s talk about those amazing lanternfish, aka myctophids, a species that many peole have likely never heard of. These small fish may make up as much as 65 percent of all deep-sea fish biomass and are a major food source for whales, dolphins, salmon, and squid. They use tiny light organs called photophores to match faint surface light, a camouflage strategy known as counterillumination that helps hide them from predators below. These are just one of the many different species that inhabit the twilight zone as part of the DVM. 

A lanternfish photographed in the ocean twilight zone, its body dotted with tiny light organs called photophores that help it blend into faint surface light as it migrates toward the surface at night. (Photo: NOAA)

Monterey Bay is arguably the world’s most important laboratory for DVM research, thanks to the Monterey Canyon, and several ground-breaking discoveries have come out of MBARI. For example, scientists at MBARI, including the legendary Bruce Robison, have used ROVs to document what they call “running the gauntlet,” when these migrators pass through layers of hungry, waiting predators. They encounter giant siphonophores with stinging tentacles, squids snag lanternfish, and giant larvaceans that build sprawling mucus “houses” that trap smaller animals. It’s like an epic battle scene out of Lord of the Rings, every single day.

This migration is also a key part of the ocean’s carbon cycle, which includes a scientific process known as the biological pump. When larger animals eat carbon-rich plankton at the surface, they eventually defecate all that carbon into the water, aka the “active transport” mechanism. Much of that carbon sinks to the bottom, sequestering it for decades or even centuries. In some regions, DVM accounts for one-third of the total carbon transport to the deep ocean. MBARI has a very interesting, long-term deep-ocean observatory called the Station M research site and observatory located nearly 12,000 feet below the surface off Santa Barbara. This site has been continuously monitored for more than three decades to track how organic matter produced near the surface eventually reaches the abyssal seafloor and feeds deep communities. I did a video about it for MBARI a few years ago.

Deployment of Mesobot, an autonomous midwater robot developed by Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, for exploration of the ocean twilight zone above Monterey Canyon, California. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Other cutting-edge technology is being brought to bear as well to help us better understand what life exists in the deep waters off California. A UC San Diego study shows that we can now use low-volume environmental DNA (eDNA) to detect the genetic signatures of huge numbers of different animals, even if we can’t see them. This free-floating DNA moves with ocean currents and can be sequenced to identify species ranging from copepods to dolphins, allowing researchers to track who is participating in the migration even when organisms are too small, fragile, or fast for traditional nets.

All of this plays out each day and night off our coast, a vast symphony of animal movement and deadly combat that, until recently, was not only poorly understood but largely invisible to science. And it’s all happening right off our shores

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Measuring the Earth’s Tremors and the Development of the Richter Scale

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Seismometer measuring earthquake impact.

We all know California is known for earthquakes. AND most people probably know there’s a reason for that: California lies along the Pacific Ring of Fire, and it also sits at the boundary between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates, creating the San Andreas Fault and making it especially prone to seismic shaking. Even if you’ve lived here for just a short while, the chances are you’ve felt a tremble or two.

Of course, the biggest earthquake most people are aware of in California was the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, which shook the city hard and led to a massive, all-consuming fire that together destroyed more than 28,000 buildings, killed an estimated 3,000 people, left roughly a quarter million residents homeless, and reshaped the city’s development and building practices for decades afterward. (Here’s a story about one particularly important building). One of my favorite books on the subject is Simon Winchester’s Crack at the Edge of the World, which is filled with wonderful facts and stories about California’s precarious geology and what happened that day in San Francisco.

More recent events continue to underscore the ever-present threat of significant temblors. In December 2024, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast near Eureka, prompting tsunami warnings and evacuations. More recently, in March 2025, the Bay Area experienced a series of minor tremors along the Hayward Fault. While these quakes caused minimal damage, there is always the looming threat of ‘The Big One’, a potentially catastrophic earthquake expected along the San Andreas Fault, well, any day now . Scientists warn that the southern section, overdue for a major rupture, could trigger widespread destruction, with estimates suggesting a magnitude 7.8 event could result in “significant casualties and economic losses”.

Damage to Interstate 880 in Oakland, CA, after it collapsed during the Loma Prieta earthquake In October 1989.
(Photo: Paul Sakuma/AP)

But what about that number, 7.8? Where does it actually come from, and what does it mean?

When we talk about measuring earthquakes: their size, their energy, their destructive potential, most of us still instinctively think of the Richter scale. It’s now shorthand for seismic strength, although, ironically, scientists today rely on other, more modern magnitude systems. We’ll get to that shortly. But the Richter scale remains one of the most influential ideas in the history of earthquake science.

The story of how it came to exist starts in a lab at a world-renowned scientific institution in Pasadena: the California Institute of Technology (CalTech). It begins with a physicist named Charles Richter.

In 1935, working with German-born seismologist Beno Gutenberg, Richter laid the groundwork for modern earthquake study and quantification. Their breakthrough work helped transform vague and subjective observations into precise, quantifiable data. Scientists could now better assess seismic risk and ultimately help protect lives and infrastructure. So the effort not only changed how we understand earthquakes, it laid the foundation for future advances in seismic prediction and preparedness.

Charles Richter studies a seismograph log that records the earth’s movements.
(Credit: Wikipedia and Gil Cooper, Los Angeles Times)

At the time, existing intensity-based earthquake measurements relied on subjective observations and the so-called the Mercalli Intensity Scale. That means that an earthquake’s severity was determined by visible damage and how people felt them. So, for example, a small earthquake near a city might appear “stronger” than a larger earthquake in a remote area simply because it was felt by more people and caused more visible damage. For example, the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake, estimated around magnitude 7.9, ruptured hundreds of miles of the San Andreas Fault, but because it struck a sparsely populated stretch of desert and ranch land, it caused relatively little recorded damage and few deaths.

Like any good scientist, Richter wanted to create a precise, instrumental method to measure earthquake magnitude. He and Gutenberg designed the Richter scale by studying seismic wave amplitudes recorded on Wood-Anderson torsion seismometers, an instrument developed in the 1920s to detect horizontal ground movement. Using a base-10 logarithmic function, they developed a system where each whole number increase represented a tenfold increase in amplitude and roughly 31 times more energy release. This allowed them to compress a wide range of earthquake sizes into a manageable, readable scale. So, for example, a magnitude 6 quake shakes the ground 10× more than a magnitude 5. Also, a magnitude 7 quake releases about 1,000× more energy than a magnitude 5 (i.e. 31.6 × 31.6 ≈ 1,000).

How the Richter Magnitude Scale of Earthquakes is determined from a seismograph. (Credit: Benjamin J. Burger)

The innovation allowed scientists to compare earthquakes across different locations and time periods, significantly improving seismic measurement and research.

Once the Richter scale came into being, it not only changed how scientists described earthquakes, it changed how we all thought about them. Earthquakes were no longer defined only by damage or casualties, but by a single, authoritative number. And so by the 1960s and 1970s, “the Richter scale” had become standard language in news reports and scientific writing. Even today, long after researchers have moved to newer magnitude systems, you still occasionally see it in news reports.

Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Map (https://databasin.org)

The Richter Scale, and Richter himself, became so well known on campus, that one of Caltech’s great comic writers and performers, J. Kent Clark, actually wrote a song about them:

“When the first shock hit the seismo, everything worked fine. It measured:

One, two, on the Richter scale, a shabby little shiver.

One, two, on the Richter scale, a queasy little quiver.

Waves brushed the seismograph as if a fly had flicked her.

One, two, on the Richter scale, it hardly woke up Richter.”

Alas, Richter, according to Clark, was so “morbidly shy” that he never showed up to any of the performances. At first, he didn’t like the song, reportedly calling it an “insult to science”, but later in life he came to appreciate its good humor. There’s a YouTube reading of the song here.

Unfortunately for Richter, over time it became clear that the Richter scale had a fundamental flaw: it couldn’t measure the largest earthquakes accurately. Because it relies on seismic wave amplitude, very powerful quakes tend to “saturate” on the scale, making different events appear similar in size.

Since the 70s scientists have come up with another way to measure earthquakes called the Moment Magnitude Scale. Developed by Hiroo Kanamori and Thomas Hanks the Moment Magnitude Scale calculates how much energy an earthquake actually releases by examining the size of the fault that slipped, how far it moved, and the physical properties of the surrounding rock. The method works reliably for both small tremors and the planet’s largest earthquakes, which the original Richter scale struggled to do.

A striking view of the Palmdale roadcut, showcasing layers of exposed rock that tell the geological story of Southern California. Located just a short distance from the San Andreas Fault, this site provides a vivid snapshot of tectonic activity, where Earth’s shifting plates have shaped the landscape dramatically over millions of years. (Credit: Erik Olsen)

Of course, neither the Richter scale nor the Moment Magnitude Scale have done much to help us actually predict earthquakes. That remains an elusive dream. That said, ShakeAlert, the state’s early-warning system, doesn’t predict quakes, but it can detect them as they begin and send alerts before the worst shaking arrives. Those seconds can be enough to drop to the ground, slow trains, or shut down sensitive systems. The system has also had misfires and missed alerts, so we’re not there yet.

Dr. Lucy Jones, who helped champion early earthquake warning in California, has said that ShakeAlert usually works exactly as intended. It is “tuned” to avoid sending alerts for minor shaking, because otherwise people would be getting notifications all the time, creating a kind of Chicken Little problem where warnings start to lose their impact.

According to experts involved with the system, ShakeAlert is designed to send alerts for earthquakes in L.A. County with a magnitude of at least 5.0, or for quakes anywhere that are strong enough to produce “light” shaking in the Los Angeles area. But according to news reports, that sometimes leaves people feeling disappointed or confused. During the 2019 Ridgecrest quakes, for example, Los Angeles didn’t receive a public alert because the shaking there was below the warning threshold, although many people felt it. Jones has said the real challenge isn’t just the technology, but making sure alerts are communicated in a way people understand and trust.

If there is ever a “Big One,” and scientists say it’s a matter of time, we can only hope we’ll get even a small amount of early notice.

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