Category: Places

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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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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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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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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When Muybridge Made Motion Visible in Palo Alto

Eadweard Muybridge’s ‘Animal Locomotion’ was the first scientific study to use photography. Now, more than 130 years later, Muybridge’s work is seen as both an innovation in photography and the science of movement.

Eadweard Muybridge, detail of ‘Bouquet’, Galloping, 1887. (Source: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands)
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I love digging into California’s technological past. Long before Silicon Valley became the engine we think of today, the state was already a proving ground for industrial innovation. Oil, agriculture, mining, and, perhaps not surprisingly, but significantly for us here, cinema. But I’m not talking about the 1930s or 1950s, not even the 20th century. The technological roots of the movie industry in California go back much further, to a dusty track in Palo Alto.

It was the summer of 1878, and a horse was caught doing something humans had argued over for centuries. For a fraction of a second, all four of its hooves left the ground at once. Not in the way painters had long imagined, legs flung forward and back in an airborne sprawl, but gathered neatly beneath the body. That brief, invisible instant, preserved by a camera, helped give birth to cinema and changed how scientists would come to understand motion in living things.

Let me explain. 

This is how painters used to depict horses at full gallop, with legs spread out above the ground. Derby at Epsom by Théodore Géricault, 1821, oil on canvas, 92 x 116 cm (Musée du Louvre)

The horse was a Thoroughbred mare named Sallie Gardner. The man who wanted the answer was Leland Stanford, a railroad magnate and former California governor. He would, of course, go on to lend his name to one of the great educational institutions in history. But before that, Stanford was fixated on a practical problem. As a serious horse breeder, racer, and betting guy, he wanted to know whether a galloping horse ever had all four hooves off the ground at once. It was a question with real implications for training, speed, injury, and breeding at a time when elite horse racing was big business. 

Artists had painted images of horses at full gallop for centuries, and they often had the horse fully splayed out above the ground. You’ve probably seen those paintings in wealthy people’s homes or at your local country club. Or maybe not. Anyway, it turns out that the gallop is too fast, and beyond the capabilities of human. Stanford wanted the answer, and Muybridge accepted his offer to find out using pioneering new technology. 

Eadweard Muybridge, The Horse in Motion (“Sallie Gardner,” 1878. (Source: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

Muybridge had been into cameras for a long time. He first drew attention in 1868 for his large historical photographs of Yosemite Valley, California, well before Ansel Adams, who did not begin photographing Yosemite seriously until the 1920s. 

In the case of horse motion, Muybridge’s solution was not a single camera; it was more of an elaborate system. At Stanford’s Palo Alto Stock Farm, which would become Stanford University, he set up a line of cameras along a track, each one triggered by a trip wire as Sallie Gardner ran past. The result was not a blur, but a sequence of sharp, discrete instants, time broken into measurable slices. Muybridge’s images revealed something unexpected: The horse does leave the ground, but not when its legs are fully stretched. The airborne moment comes when the legs are tucked beneath the body, a moment that the human eye hadn’t seen before.

What Muybridge actually demonstrated was that motion itself could be turned into evidence. The camera was no longer just a tool for portraits or landscapes. It became a machine for understanding reality.

Muybridge in 1899 (Wikipedia)

I guess you could say in a way that Sallie Gardner really was something like the world’s first movie star, though they didn’t call it that. The photographs did show motion on screen, per se, but they allowed you to see movement in stages. Within a year, Muybridge developed the zoopraxiscope, a projection device that animated sequences of motion using images painted or printed on rotating glass discs, often derived from his photographs. 

It wasn’t a modern movie projector, and it didn’t project photographic film in the way later cinema would. But it was among the first devices to project moving images to public audiences, establishing the visual logic that cinema would later put to use. It is believed that the device was one of the primary inspirations for Thomas Edison and William Kennedy Dickson‘s Kinetoscope, the first commercial film exhibition system.

The zoopraxiscope disc, circa 1893 by Eadweard Muybridge, considered an important predecessor of the movie projector.

So, key to the effort was not only that Muybridge kind of overturned centuries of artistic convention, but he also, in a way, laid out the basic grammar of cinema: break time into frames, control the shutter, sequence the images, then reassemble them into motion. Hollywood would later industrialize all of this in Southern California, though the first experiment took place in Northern California.

Muybridge’s technological advances mattered as much as his images (he would go on to do many other animals including humans). He pushed shutter speeds and synchronized multiple cameras. These were a few of the problems early filmmakers confronted decades later. Long before movie studios, California was already solving the physics of film.

Plate from ‘Animal Locomotion’ Series, 1887 (by Eadweard Muybridge)

There was also a scientific payoff. Muybridge’s sequences transformed the study of animal locomotion. For the first time, biologists and physiologists could see how bodies actually moved, not how they appeared to move. A gait could be compared with another, giving insight into biomechanics. 

Scientists, particularly those in Europe took notice. Physiologists such as Étienne-Jules Marey built on Muybridge’s work, dropping poor cats upside down and making motion photography into a formal tool for studying living systems. It was a way for biology to see life in a new way.

Falling Cat by Étienne-Jules Marey

Of course, today, moving imagery is essential to understanding how bodies move because motion is often too fast and complex for the naked eye. High-speed video and motion capture are used to analyze animal locomotion, study human gait and injury, improve athletic performance, and reveal behaviors in wildlife that would otherwise be invisible. Several institutions in California have been harnessing this power for years. Caltech researchers use high-speed video to fundamentally revise how scientists understand insect flight. Stanford’s Neuromuscular Biomechanics Lab identifies abnormal walking patterns in children, helping, for example, kids with cerebral palsy. At Scripps Institution of Oceanography, scientists found that fish use nearly twice as much energy hovering as they do resting, contradicting previous assumptions.

Hollywood would later perfect illusion, narrative, glamour, let alone bring digital technology to bear to give us aliens and dinosaurs, but it started in Palo Alto with a horse named Sallie Gardner, and yes, a rich guy and a curious, talented inventor. Muybridge went on to produce over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion between 1884 and 1886.

There is a plaque that marks the site of Muybridge’s experiments. It’s California Historical Landmark No. 834, located at Stanford University on Campus Drive West, near the golf driving range. You might walk past it without knowing. But you could argue that this is one of those nondescript places where movie-making began. And of course, it happened here in California.  

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