The story of corals in the modern age on this planet is one of near-total despair. I’ve done several stories on corals and have spent many hours diving reefs around the world, from the Mesoamerican Reef in Belize to the unbelievably robust and dazzling reefs in Indonesia. There are still some incredible places where corals survive, but they are becoming fewer and farther between. I don’t want to get too deep into all the statistics, but suffice it to say: scientists estimate that we have already lost about half of the world’s corals since the 1950s, and that number could rise to as much as 90 percent by 2050 if current rates of bleaching and die-offs continue.
What’s crazy is that we still don’t completely understand corals, or exactly why they are dying. We know that corals are symbionts with microscopic algae called zooxanthellae (pronounced zo-zan-THEL-ee). The corals provide cover, a place to live, and nutrients for the algae. In return, the algae provide sugars and oxygen through photosynthesis, fueling coral growth and reef-building. But when the planet warms, or when waters become too acidic, the relationship often collapses. The algae either die or flee the coral. Without that steady food source—what one scientist I interviewed for this story called “a candy store”—corals turn ghostly white in a process known as bleaching. If stressful conditions persist, they starve and die.
The Great Barrier Reef, once Earth’s largest living structure, has suffered five mass bleaching events since 1998, and vast stretches have become little more than graveyards of coral skeletons. The scale of this ecological disaster is almost unimaginable. And so scientists around the world are in a race to figure out what’s happening and how to at least try to slow down the bleaching events sweeping through nearly every major reef system.
An image of Montipora coral polyps taken with the BUMP. Each polyp has a mouth and a set of tentacles and the red dots are individual microalgae residing inside the coral tissue. (Photo: Or Ben-Zvi)
One place where scientists are making small strides is at the Jaffe Lab, which I visited with my colleague Tod Mesirow and where researchers like Dr. Jaffe and Dr. Or Ben-Zvi have developed a new kind of underwater microscope that allows them to get close enough to corals to actually see the algae in action.
This is no small feat. Zooxanthellae are only about 5–10 microns across, about one-tenth the width of a human hair, and invisible to the naked eye. With the new microscope and camera system, though, they can be seen in astonishing detail. The lab has captured unprecedented behavior, including corals fighting with each other for space, fusing together, and even responding to invading algae.
When I first reported on this imaging system years ago, it was still in its early stages. At the time, it was known as the BUM for Benthic Underwater Microscope. Since then, the Scripps team has added a powerful new capability: a pulsing blue light that lets them measure photosynthesis in real time. They call it pulse amplitude modulated light or PAM, and so now the system is known as the BUMP.
A field deployment of the BUMP in the Red Sea, where local corals were imaged and measured. (Photo: Or Ben-Zvi)
Here’s how it works: blue excitation light stimulates the algae’s chlorophyll, which then re-emits some of that energy as red fluorescence. By tracking how much of this red fluorescence is produced, researchers can calculate indices of photochemical efficiency, essentially how well the algae are converting light into energy for photosynthesis. This doesn’t give a direct count of sugars or photons consumed, but it does provide a reliable window into the health and productivity of the algae, and by extension, the coral itself.
What’s crucial is that all of this imaging takes place in situ—right in the ocean, on living reefs—rather than in the artificial setting of an aquarium or laboratory.
New tools are essential if we’re going to solve many of our biggest problems, and it’s at places like Scripps in California where scientists are hard at work creating instruments that help us see the world in entirely new ways. “There’s so much to learn about the ocean and its ecosystems, and my own key to understanding them is really the development of new instrumentation,” says Jaffe.
Dr. Ben-Zvi gave us a demonstration of how the system works in an aquarium holding several species of corals, including Stylophora, a common collector’s coral. She showed us the remarkable capabilities of the camera-microscope, which illuminated and brought into crisp focus the tiny coral polyps along with their algal partners. On the screen we watched them in real time, tentacles waving as they absorbed the flashes of light from the BUMP, appearing, almost, as if they were dancing happily.
What this new tool allows scientists to do is determine whether corals may be under stress from factors like warming seas, pollution, or disease. Ideally, these warning signs are detected before the corals expel their zooxanthellae and bleach. Researchers are also learning far more about the everyday behavior of corals: something rarely studied in situ, directly in the ocean.
That in-their-native-environment aspect of the work is crucial, because corals often behave very differently in aquariums than they do on wild reefs. That’s where this microscope promises to be a powerful tool: offering insights into how corals really live, fight, and respond to stress.
Of course, what we do once we document a reef under stress is another matter. Dr. Ben-Zvi suggests there may be possibilities for remediation, though she admits it’s difficult to know exactly what those are. Perhaps reducing pollution, limiting fishing, or cutting ship traffic in vulnerable areas could help. But given that we seem unable—or unwilling—to stop the warming of the seas, these measures can feel like stopgaps rather than solutions. Still, knowledge is the foundation for any action, and this new tool is a breakthrough for coral imaging. If deployed widely, it could generate an invaluable dataset for researchers around the globe. The scientists behind it even hope to build multiple systems, perhaps commercializing them, to vastly expand the reach of this kind of monitoring.
But even Jaffe concedes it may already be too late: “Could a world exist without corals? Yeah, I think so,” he said. “It would be sad, but it’s going that way.”
All the same, the images the tool produces are breathtaking, and at the very least, they might jolt people into realizing that this is a crisis worth trying to solve. If we can’t, then future generations will be left only with these hauntingly beautiful images to remember the diverse and gorgeous animals that once flourished along the edges of the sea.
A healthy coral reef in Indonesia (Photo: Erik Olsen)
Is that valuable? Yes, but not nearly as valuable as saving the living reefs themselves. Dr. Jaffe told us,
“I’m on a mission to help people feel empathy toward the creatures of the sea. At the same time, we need to learn just how beautiful they are. For me, the combination of beauty and science has been at the heart of my life’s work.”
His words capture the spirit of this research. The underwater microscope isn’t just a scientific instrument. It’s a lens into a hidden world, one that may inspire people to care enough to act before it’s gone. Too bad the clock is ticking so fast.
Having spent much of my youth in Newport Beach, my life was shaped by the ocean. I spent countless days in the surf, bodyboarding, bodysurfing, or playing volleyball on the sand with friends. When a southern storm rolled through, we’d rush to Big Corona and throw ourselves into the heavy swells, often getting slammed hard and learning deep respect for the ocean, a respect that I still harbor today. Sometimes the waves were so large they were genuinely terrifying, the kind of surf that would have made my mother gasp, had this not been an era when parents rarely knew what their kids were doing from dawn to dusk. That freedom, especially in Southern California, made the ocean feel like both a playground and a proving ground.
Across the channel at the Newport jetty was where the action was most intense. The surf was bigger, louder. We sat on the sand and held back, watching the brave and sometimes the foolish throw themselves into the water. That place, then and now, is called the Wedge.
The Wedge in Newport Beach, California (Photo: Alex Verharst 2016)
There is something unforgettable about the Wedge and the way its waves crash with such raw force. Sometimes they detonate just offshore, sending water skyrocketing into the air; other times they slam thunderously against the sand, eliciting groans and whoops from bystanders. The waves behave strangely at the Wedge, smashing into one another, often combining their force, and creating moments of exquisite chaos.
These colliding waves are what make the place both spectacular and dangerous, the result of a unique mix of physics and geology that exists almost nowhere else on earth. That combination has made it, to this day, one of the world’s most famous surf and bodysurfing spots. If you want a glimpse of what I mean, just search YouTube, where the insanity speaks for itself. This compilation is from earlier this year.
The Wedge’s origin story begins in the 1930s, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers extended Newport Harbor’s West Jetty to protect the harbor mouth from sand buildup and currents. What no one anticipated was that this angled wall of rock would create a perfect mirror for waves arriving from the south and southwest. Instead of dispersing, these waves slam into the jetty and reflect diagonally back toward the shore. The reflected energy doesn’t dissipate, it collides with the next incoming wave. When the two wave crests line up in phase, their energies combine, and the result is a much steeper, taller, and more powerful wave. In physics this is known as constructive interference: two sets of energy stacking into a single, towering peak.
This wave-doubling effect only works under specific conditions. Long-period south swells, often generated by hurricanes off Mexico or storms deep in the South Pacific, line up nearly parallel to the jetty. Their orientation means maximum contact and reflection. Surfers and bodysurfers describe the result as a pyramid-shaped breaker, or wedge, rising steeply before collapsing with extraordinary force. On the biggest days, these waves can reach 20 to 30 feet, twice the size of surrounding surf.
Crowds gather to watch the carnage at The Wedge in Newport Beach (Photo by D Ramey Logan)
Geology and geography make the situation even more dramatic. The seafloor near The Wedge slopes upward very steeply into a narrow strip of beach. Instead of allowing waves to break gradually, the bathymetry forces them to jack up suddenly, creating a thick lip that pitches forward into shallow water. It’s called a shorebreak, and man, they can be dangerous. More on that in a moment.
Unlike classic point breaks such as Malibu, where waves peel cleanly along a gradual reef, The Wedge produces brutal closeouts: vertical walls of water that crash all at once, leaving no escape route.
It actually can get worse. After each wave explodes on the beach, the backwash races seaward, colliding with the next incoming swell and adding more turbulence. Surfers call it chaos; lifeguards call it dangerous, even life-threatening. Spinal injuries, broken bones, and concussions are common at The Wedge. By 2013, the Encyclopedia of Surfing estimated that the Wedge had claimed eight lives, left 35 people paralyzed, and sent thousands more to the hospital with broken bones, dislocations, and other trauma—making it the most injury-prone wave break in the world. A 2020 epidemiological survey places The Wedge among the most lethal surf breaks globally (alongside Pipeline and Teahupo’o), largely due to head-first “over the falls” impacts on the shallow sea floor.
The Wedge in Google Maps
Interesting fact: Long before the Wedge was built, the waves pounding that corner of the Newport Beach jetty were already fierce. In 1926, Hollywood icon John Wayne (then still Marion Morrison) tried bodysurfing there while he was a USC football player. He was slammed into the sand, shattering his shoulder and ending his athletic scholarship. The accident closed the door on his football career but opened the one that led him to Hollywood stardom.
Oceanographers have studied the physics behind the Wedge’s unique surfbreak in broader terms. Research into wave reflection and interference confirms what locals have known for decades: man-made structures like jetties can redirect swell energy in ways that amplify, rather than reduce, wave height. Studies on steep nearshore bathymetry show how sudden shoaling increases the violence of breaking waves. The Wedge combines both effects in one location, making it a rare and extreme case study in coastal dynamics. In other words, yes, it’s gnarly.
Of course, with all that danger comes spectacle, and when the Wedge is firing, it’s not unusual for hundreds of spectators to line the sand and jetty to watch. In August 2025, the California Coastal Commission approved plans for a 200-foot ADA-compliant concrete pathway and a 10-foot-wide viewing pad along the northern jetty, designed to make the experience safer and more inclusive. The project will provide better access for people using wheelchairs, walkers, and strollers, while also giving life guards and first responders improved vantage points when the surf turns chaotic.
I still get to the Wedge on occasion to watch the carnage. And while in my younger years, I might have ventured out to catch a wave or two if the conditions were relatively mellow, today, I prefer the view from shore, leaving the powerful surf to the younger bodysurfers hungry for a rush.
It’s time for California to put people back in the deep. A human-occupied submersible belongs in California waters, and we’ve waited long enough.
For decades, the state had a strong human-occupied submersible presence, from Navy test craft in San Diego to long-serving civilian science HOVs like the Delta. Those vehicles have been retired or relocated, leaving the West Coast without a single home-based, active human-occupied research submersible (I am not counting OceanGate’s Titan sub for numerous reasons, like the fact it was based in Seattle, but foremost is it was not “classed,” nor was it created for scientific use). Restoring that capability would not only honor California’s legacy of ocean exploration but also put the state back at the forefront of direct human observation in the deep sea. The time has come.
Side note: I’ve had the rare privilege of diving beneath the waves in a submersible three times in three different subs, including one descent to more than 2,000 feet with scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Without exaggeration, it stands among the greatest experiences of my life.
The United States once had a small fleet of working research HOVs. Today it has essentially one deep-diving scientific HOV in regular service: Alvin, operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) for the National Deep Submergence Facility. Alvin is magnificent, now upgraded to reach 6,500 meters, but it is based on the Atlantic (in Massachusetts) and scheduled years in advance at immense cost.
The human-occupied submersible Alvin surfaces during the 2004 “Mountains in the Sea” Expedition, returning from a dive to explore deep seamount habitats teeming with corals, sponges, and other rarely seen marine life. (Photo: NOAA, Public Domain)
It helps to remember how we got here. The Navy placed Alvin in service in 1964, a Cold War investment that later became a pillar of basic research, investigating hydrothermal vents, shipwrecks and underwater volcanoes, among many, many other accomplishments. Over six decades of safe operations, Alvin has logged thousands of dives and undergone multiple retrofits, each expanding its depth range. Now rated to 6,500 meters, it can reach 98 percent of the ocean floor. WHOI’s partnership model with the Navy and universities shows exactly how public investment and science can reinforce each other. But Alvin is based on the East Coast: all that capability, history, and expertise is thousands of miles away. California needs its own Alvin. Or something even better…and perhaps cheaper. Though by cheaper I do not mean less safe.
For a time, California actually had multiple HOVs. The Navy fielded sister craft to Alvin, including Turtle and Sea Cliff. Both Turtle and Sea Cliff spent their careers with Submarine Development Group ONE in San Diego. Turtle was retired in the late 1990s, and Sea Cliff, launched in 1968 and later upgraded for greater depths, also left service by the end of that decade, ending the Navy’s home-ported HOV presence on the West Coast.
On the Atlantic side, Harbor Branch’s two Johnson Sea Link HOVs supported science and search-and-recovery work for decades before the program ended in 2011 due to funding constraints and shifting research priorities. I’ve interviewed renowned marine biologist Edith Widder several times, and she often speaks about how pivotal her dives in the Johnson Sea Link submersibles were to her career studying animal bioluminescence.
“Submersibles are essential for exploring the planet’s largest and least understood habitat, ” Widder told me. “A human-occupied, untethered submersible offers an unmatched window into ocean life, far surpassing what remotely operated vehicles can provide. ROVs, with their noisy thrusters and blazing lights, often scare away marine animals, and even the most advanced cameras still can’t match the sensitivity of the fully dark-adapted human eye for observing bioluminescence.”
In the central Pacific, the University of Hawaiʻi’s HURL operated Pisces IV and V for much of the 2000s and 2010s, then suspended operations amid funding and ship transitions. Through attrition and budget choices, the working U.S. fleet shrank from a handful to essentially one deep-diving research HOV today.
Manned submersibles are costly to build and operate, and they demand specialized crews, maintenance, and support ships or platforms. It’s easy to list reasons why California shouldn’t invest in a new generation of human-occupied subs. But that mindset has kept us out of the deep for far too long. It’s time to turn the conversation around and recognize why having one here would be a transformative asset for science, education, and exploration.
The Seacliff and Turtle submersibles (Photo: U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command photo. Public Domain)
California’s own human-occupied sub legacy is short, but notable. In addition to the Navy submersibles noted above, the Delta submersible, a compact, ABS-class HOV rated to about 1,200 feet, operated from Ventura and later Moss Landing, supporting dozens of fishery and habitat studies from the Southern California Bight to central California. Built by Delta Oceanographics in Torrance, Delta dives in the mid-1990s produced baseline data that still underpin rockfish management, MPA assessments, and predictive habitat maps. The sub’s ability to place scientists directly on the seafloor allowed for nuanced observations of species behavior, habitat complexity, and human impacts that remote tools often miss. Many of these datasets remain among the most detailed visual records of California’s deeper reef ecosystems.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) operates a world-class research fleet with a robust remotely operated vehicle (ROV) program, but no human-occupied vehicle—a strategic decision the institute made years ago in favor of robotics over direct human dives. (Photo: Erik Olsen)
In the late 1990s, the program shifted north to Moss Landing, where it was operated in partnership with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and other institutions. At the time, MBARI was still in the early years of exploring human-occupied vehicles, like Bruce Robison’s experience piloting the Deep Rover HOV in Monterey Canyon in 1985. To many at MBARI, human occupancy in submersibles began to seem more like a luxury than a necessity. If the goal was to maximize scientific output and engineering innovation, remotely operated vehicles offered longer bottom times, greater payload capacity, and fewer safety constraints. That realization drove MBARI to invest heavily in ROV technology, setting the stage for a long-term move away from human-occupied systems.
Which leads us to the present moment: California’s spectacular coast faces mounting environmental threats, just as public interest in ocean science wanes. And yet, we have no human-occupied research submersible, no way for scientists or the public to directly experience the deep ocean that shapes our state’s future.
The Delta submersible, once a workhorse of California’s deep-sea research with over 5,800 dives, operated from Ventura and later Moss Landing between the 1980s and 2000s. Sold in 2011 in a non-functional state, it remains out of service—symbolizing the end of the state’s home-ported human-occupied submersible era.
Look, robots are incredible. MBARI’s ROVs and AUVs set global standards, and they should continue to be funded and expanded. But if you talk to veteran deep-sea biologists and geologists, they will tell you that being inside the environment changes the science.
Dr. Adam Soule, chief scientist for Deep Submergence at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) agrees, “Having a human presence in the deep sea is irreplaceable. The ability for humans to quickly and efficiently process the inherently 3D world around them allows for really efficient operations and excellent sampling potential. Besides, there is no better experience for inspiring young scientists and for ensuring that any scientist can get the most out of unmanned systems than immersing themselves in the environment.”
Some of our most prominent voices are also speaking out about the need to explore the ocean. I recently produced an hour-long episode of the PBS science program NOVA and one episode was about the new generation of submersibles being built right now by companies like Florida-based Triton Submarines. I had the privilege of talking to filmmaker and ocean explorer James Cameron, who was adamant that human participation in ocean exploration is critical to sustaining public interest and political will.
“The more you understand the ocean, the more you love the ocean, the more you’re fascinated by it, and the more you’ll fight to protect it,” Cameron told me.
The author with James Cameron in front of his submersible the Deepsea Challenger. (Erik Olsen)
Human eyes and brains pick up weak bioluminescence out of the corner of vision, pivot to follow a squid that just appeared at the edge of a light cone, or decide in the moment to pause and watch a behavior a diving team has never seen before. NOAA’s own materials explain the basic value of HOVs this way: you put scientists directly into the natural deep-ocean environment, which can improve environmental evaluation and sensory surveillance. Presence is a measurement instrument.
California is exactly where that presence would pay off. Think about Davidson Seamount, an underwater mountain larger than many national parks, added to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary because of its ancient coral gardens and extraordinary biodiversity. We know this place mostly through ROVs, and we should keep using them, but a California HOV could carry sanctuary scientists, MBARI biologists, and students from Hopkins Marine Station or Scripps into those coral forests to make fine-scale observations, sample with delicacy, and come home with stories that move the public. Put a student in that viewport and you create a career. Put a donor there and you create a program.
A time-lapse camera designed by MBARI engineers allowed researchers to observe activity at the Octopus Garden between research expeditions. (Photo: MBARI)
Cold seeps and methane ecology are another natural fit. Off Southern California and along the borderlands there are active methane seep fields with complex microbial and animal communities. Recent work near seeps has even turned up newly described sea spiders associated with methane-oxidizing bacteria, a striking reminder that the deep Pacific still surprises us. An HOV complements ROV sampling by letting observers linger, follow odor plumes by sight and instrument, and make rapid, in-situ decisions about fragile communities that are easy to miss on video. That kind of fine-grained exploration connects directly to California’s climate priorities, since methane processes in the ocean intersect with carbon budgets.
There are practical use cases all over the coast. A California HOV could support geohazard work on active faults and slope failures that threaten seafloor cables and coastal infrastructure. It could conduct pre- and post-event surveys at oil-and-gas seep sites in the Santa Barbara Channel to ground-truth airborne methane measurements. It could document deep-water MPA effectiveness where visual census by divers is impossible. It could make repeated visits to whale falls, oxygen minimum zone interfaces, or sponge grounds to study change across seasons.
An autonomous underwater craft used to map DDT barrels on the seafloor off California. (Photo: Scripps Institution of Oceanography at U.C. San Diego)
It could also play a crucial role in high-profile discoveries like the recent ROV surveys that revealed thousands of corroding barrels linked to mid-20th-century DDT dumping off Southern California. Those missions produced stark imagery of the problem, but a human-occupied dive would have allowed scientists to make on-the-spot decisions about barrel sampling, trace-chemical measurements, and sediment core collection, as well as to inspect surrounding habitats for contamination impacts in real time. The immediacy of human observation could help shape quicker, more targeted responses to environmental threats of this scale.
And it’s not just the seafloor that matters. Some of the most biologically important parts of the ocean lie well above the bottom. The ocean’s twilight zone, roughly 200 to 1,000 meters deep, is a vast, dimly lit layer that contains one of the planet’s largest reservoirs of life by biomass. (My dive with WHOI was done to study the ocean’s twilight zone). Every day, trillions of organisms participate in the planet’s largest migration, the diel vertical migration, moving up toward the surface at night to feed and returning to depth by day. This zone drives global carbon cycling, supports commercial fish stocks, and is home to remarkable gelatinous animals, squid, and deepwater fishes that are rarely seen in situ.
Launching the Triton 3300/3 (Photo: Erik Olsen)
The Triton 3300/3’s 1,000-meter depth rating (I’ve been in one twice) puts the entire twilight zone within reach, enabling direct observation of these daily movements, predator-prey interactions, and delicate species that often disintegrate into goo in nets. Human presence here allows scientists to make real-time decisions to follow unusual aggregations, sample with precision, and record high-quality imagery that captures how this midwater world works, something uncrewed systems alone rarely match.
It could even serve as a classroom at depth for carefully designed outreach dives, giving educators footage and first-person accounts that no livestream can quite match. Each of these missions is stronger with people on site, conferring, pointing, deciding, and noticing.
While Monterey Bay would be a natural fit because of MBARI, Hopkins, and the sanctuary’s deepwater treasures, Southern California could be just as compelling. Catalina Island, with its proximity to submarine canyons, coral gardens, and cold seeps of the Southern California Bight, offers rich science targets and the existing facilities of USC’s Wrigley Marine Science Center. Los Angeles or Long Beach would add the advantage of major port infrastructure and a vast urban audience, making it easier to combine high-impact research with public tours, donor events, and media outreach. And San Diego with its deep naval history, active maritime industry, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and proximity to both U.S. and Mexican waters, could serve as a southern hub for exploration and rapid response to discoveries or environmental events. These regions could even share the vehicle seasonally: Monterey in summer for sanctuary work, Catalina/LA or San Diego in winter for Southern California Bight missions, spreading both benefits and funding responsibility.
The author in front of the Triton 3300/3 in the Bahamas (Photo: Erik Olsen)
For budgeting, a proven benchmark is the Triton 3300/3, a three-person, 1,000-meter (3,300-foot) human-occupied vehicle used widely in science and filming. New units are quoted in the four to five million dollar range, with recent builds coming in around $4–4.75 million depending on specifications. Beyond the vehicle, launch and recovery systems such as a 25–30-ton A-frame or LARS and the deck integration required for a suitable support ship can run into the high six to low seven figures. Modern acrylic-sphere subs like the Triton are designed for predictable, minimized scheduled maintenance, but budgets still need to account for annual surveys, battery service, insurance, and ongoing crew training. Taken together, a California-based HOV program could be launched for an initial capital investment of roughly $6–7 million, with operating budgets scaled to the number of missions each year. So, not cheap. But doable for someone of means and purpose and curiosity. See below.
Who would benefit if California restored this capability? Everyone who already works here. MBARI operates a world-class fleet of ROVs and AUVs but has no resident HOV. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Hopkins Marine Station, and USC’s Wrigley Marine Science Center train generations of ocean scientists who rarely get the option to do HOV work without flying across the country and waiting for a slot. NOAA and the sanctuaries need efficient ways to inspect resources and respond to events. A west-coast human-occupied research submersible based in Monterey Bay, Catalina, Los Angeles, or San Diego would plug into ship time on vessels already here, coordinate with ROV teams for hybrid dives, and cut mobilization costs for Pacific missions.
A new Triton 660 AVA submersible slips into the turquoise waters of the Bahamas, beginning its first voyage. Built for dives to 660 feet (200 meters), it offers passengers a front-row seat to reefs, shipwrecks, and marine life far beyond normal scuba limits, making it an ideal draw for high-end tourism. (Photo: Erik Olsen)
What would it take? A benefactor and a compact partnership. California has the donors (hello, curious billionaires!), companies, and public-private institutions to do this right. A philanthropic lead gift could underwrite acquisition of a proven, classed HOV and its support systems, while MBARI, Scripps, or USC could provide engineering, pilots, and safety culture within the UNOLS standards that govern HOV operations. No OceanGates. Alvin’s long record shows the model. Add a state match for workforce and student access, and a sanctuary partnership to guarantee annual science priorities, and you have a durable program that serves research, stewardship, and public engagement.
Skeptics will say that robots already do the job. They do a lot of it. They do not do all of it. If the U.S. is content to have only one deep research HOV based on the opposite coast, we will forego the unique perspectives and serendipity that only people bring, and we will keep telling California students to wait their turn or watch the ROV feed from their laptops or phones. California can do better. We did, for years, when the Delta sub spent long seasons quietly counting fish and mapping habitats off Ventura and the Channel Islands. Then that capability faded. If we rebuild it here, we restore a missing rung on the ladder from tidepools to trenches, and we align the state’s science, climate, and education missions with a tool that is both a laboratory and a conversion experience.
The author at more than 2000 feet beneath the surface of the ocean. (Photo: Erik Olsen)
Start with a compact, 1,000-meter-class HOV that can work daily in most of California’s shelf and slope habitats. Pair it with our ROVs for tandem missions and cinematography of the sub and its occupants in action. Commit a share of dives to student and educator participation, recorded and repackaged for museums and broadcast. Reserve another share for rapid-response science at seeps, landslides, unusual biological events, or contamination crises like the DDT dumpsite. Build a donor program around named expeditions to Davidson Seamount, Catalina’s coral gardens, and the Channel Islands. Then, if the community wants to go deeper, plan toward a second vehicle or an upgrade path. The science is waiting. The coast is ready. And the case is clear. California should restore its human-occupied submersible fleet.
I’m going to keep this week’s article shorter than usual. I want to talk about the ocean. I know I do this a lot; many articles on California Curated are ocean-related (please explore, I think you’ll enjoy them). But that’s because I honestly believe it’s the most important feature on the planet. Protecting the ocean is the most important thing we can do. Let me explain.
The ocean covers more than 70 percent of Earth’s surface. So why do we even call this place Earth? We should call it Planet Ocean. Or Thalassa, from the Greek word for sea.
But it’s not just the size that matters, it’s the ocean’s vast, mysterious depth and the essential role it plays in sustaining life on Earth. The ocean is vital to all living things. Tiny organisms called phytoplankton absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than any other biological force on the planet. Through photosynthesis, they transform sunlight and carbon into organic matter, forming the base of the marine food web. Despite making up just a fraction of Earth’s plant biomass, phytoplankton are responsible for nearly half of all global carbon fixation. Zooplankton are tiny animals that eat phytoplankton. Zooplankton feed small fish, which feed bigger fish, which feed us. That’s the food chain. It’s literally a scaffolding for all life on earth. And a huge percentage of humanity depends on it to survive. If one link breaks, the whole thing risks collapse.
Phytoplankton (Photo: NOAA)
Which brings me to why I’m writing this. I recently watched the new National Geographic documentary Oceans, narrated by David Attenborough. I love Attenborough. His calm, British-inflected voice has been the backdrop to so much of my science education over the years. He feels like a wise grandfather. Kind, brilliant, and usually right.
In this film, he is absolutely right.
The documentary takes us to places no human has ever seen. In one scene, the team attaches cameras to a deep-sea trawling net. The footage is devastating. These massive nets kill everything in their path. Octopuses, fish, coral, entire ecosystems. Most of the species caught never even make it to market. They are bycatch, considered waste and tossed back into the sea. It’s wasteful, brutal, and legal. These trawlers are still out there, operating at scale, stripping the sea of life.
Bottom Trawling scene from Oceans with David Attenborough (National Geographic)
The film also shows how industrial fishing has hammered fish populations around the world. We are seeing species crash and food chains fracture. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, nearly 35 percent of the world’s fish stocks are being overfished, a figure that has more than tripled since the 1970s. This kind of collapse has never happened before at this scale. And it is not getting better. We are talking about extinctions. We are talking about systems breaking down.
Friends often tell me the biggest threats to our planet are climate change, pollution, and microplastics. They’re not wrong. All this stuff is connected in a way. But if you ask me what really threatens human survival, it’s the breakdown of ocean ecosystems. If we lose one part of that chain for good, it won’t just be bad. It could be the beginning of the end. And I mean for humans, for organized society, not for all life on earth.
And yet, there is hope.
Kelp bed and bass in a marine protected area (MPA) in California’s Channel Islands (Photo: Erik Olsen)
Like any great documentary, Oceans ends with a sliver of optimism. It brings us back to California. Specifically, to the Channel Islands, one of my favorite places on Earth. I’ve been out there many times, several times recently reporting on ghost lobster traps and exploring. It’s stunning. And there is something very special going on.
Park rangers patrol the waters off the Channel Islands (Photo: Erik Olsen)
Much of the Channel Islands are protected as a Marine Protected Area, or MPA. You can’t fish. You can’t extract. And, most importantly, the rules are enforced. There are rangers out there at most all times patrolling. That part is key. I’ve done stories in places like Belize, Kiribati and Indonesia where the protections exist on paper but don’t work in practice. Kiribati, for instance, established the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, one of the largest MPAs on the planet. But it’s so vast and remote that enforcing its protections is nearly impossible. It’s a good idea on paper, but a cautionary tale in execution. But here in California, the rangers take it seriously. Because of that, the ecosystem is bouncing back. Twenty years after protection began, the kelp, the fish, the invertebrates, they’re thriving. These islands are alive.
California’s MPAs are a model for the world. They prove that if we give the ocean space and time, it will heal. But they remain the exception. They don’t have to be.
Marine Protected Area (MPA) sign in Corona del Mar, CA (Photo: Erik Olsen)
There’s a global movement right now to protect 30 percent of the world’s oceans by 2030. It’s called 30 by 30. Just recently, at the 2025 UN Ocean Conference in Nice, France, more than 70 countries reaffirmed their commitment to the 30 by 30 goal, calling for urgent action to protect ocean biodiversity and create well-managed, effectively enforced MPAs around the world. I’m not naive. I don’t think we’ll hit that goal perfectly. But we are finally moving in the right direction. And we don’t have another option. The ocean is too important.
So I’ll step off the soapbox now and let you enjoy your day. But before you click away, please take a moment to think about the ocean. Think about what it gives us. Think about how it restores us. As a diver, I can tell you there’s nothing like the world beneath the waves. It’s as strange, beautiful, and alien as any other planet we’ve imagined. The creatures there rival anything you’d find in Mos Eisley on Tatooine.
The author filming cuttlefish in Indonesia. Such strange creatures. (Photo: Erik Olsen)
Watch the documentary. Let it educate and inspire you. It might fill you with dread too. But in the end, its message is hopeful. And that message lands right here off the coast of California, the greatest state in the country. Or at least, that’s the opinion of one well-traveled guy with a newsletter about the state he loves.
I love reading New York Times obituaries, not because of any morbid fascination with death, but because they offer a window into extraordinary lives that might otherwise go unnoticed. These tributes often highlight people whose work had real impact, even if their names were never widely known. Unlike the celebrity coverage that fills so much of the media, these obituaries can be quietly riveting, full of depth, insight, and genuine accomplishment.
For two years I managed the New York Times video obituary series called Last Word. We interviewed people of high accomplishment who had made a difference in the world BEFORE they died, thus giving them a chance, at a latter age (in our case 75 was the youngest, but more often people would be in their 80s) to tell their own stories about their lives. They signed an agreement acknowledging that the interview would not be shown until after their death. Hence the series title: Last Word. Anyway, when I ran the program, I produced video obituaries for people as varied as Neil Simon, Hugh Hefner, Sandra Day O’Connor, Philip Roth, Edward Albee, and my favorite, the great Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson. Spending time and learning about their lives in their own words was a joy.
All of that is to say that obituaries often reveal the lives and accomplishments of people who have changed the world. These are stories that might never be told so thoughtfully or thoroughly anywhere else.
California Institute of Technology (Photo: Erik Olsen)
Which bring us to a quiet lab at Caltech in 1958, where two young biologists performed what some still call “the most beautiful experiment in biology”. Their names were Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl, and what they uncovered helped confirm the foundational model of modern genetics. With a simple centrifuge, a dash of heavy nitrogen, and a bold hypothesis, they confirmed how DNA, life’s instruction manual, copies itself. And all of it took place right here in California at one of the world’s preeminent scientific institutions: the California Institute of Technology or CalTech, in Pasadena. The state is blessed to have so many great scientific minds and institutions where people work intensely, often in obscurity, to uncover the secrets of life and the universe.
Franklin Stahl died recently at his home in Oregon, where he had spent much of his career teaching and researching genetics. The New York Times obituary offered a thoughtful account of his life and work, capturing his contributions to science with typical respect. But after reading it, I realized I still didn’t fully grasp the experiment that made him famous, the Meselson-Stahl experiment, the one he conducted with Matthew Meselson at Caltech. It was mentioned, of course, but not explained in a way that brought its brilliance to life. So I decided to dig a little deeper.
Franklin Stahl in an undated photo. (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Library and Archives)
The Meselson-Stahl experiment didn’t just prove a point. It told a story about how knowledge is built: carefully, creatively, and with a precision that leaves no room for doubt. It became a model for how science can answer big questions with simple, clean logic and careful experimentation. And it all happened in California.
Let’s back up: When Watson and Crick proposed their now-famous double helix structure of DNA in 1953 (with significant, poorly recognized help from Rosalind Franklin), they also suggested a theory about how it might replicate. Their idea was that DNA separates into two strands, and each strand acts as a template to build a new one. That would mean each new DNA molecule is made of one old strand and one new. It was called the semi-conservative model. But there were other theories too. One proposed that the entire double helix stayed together and served as a model for building an entirely new molecule, leaving the original untouched. Another suggested that DNA might break apart and reassemble in fragments, mixing old and new in chunks. These were all plausible ideas. But only one could be true.
Watson and Crick with their model of the DNA molecule (Photo: A Barrington Brown/Gonville & Caius College/Science Photo Library)
To find out, Meselson and Stahl grew E. coli bacteria in a medium containing heavy nitrogen (nitrogen is a key component of DNA), a stable isotope that made the DNA denser than normal. After several generations, all the bacterial DNA was fully “heavy.” Then they transferred the bacteria into a medium with normal nitrogen and let them divide. After one generation, they spun the DNA in a centrifuge that separated it by weight. If DNA copied itself conservatively, the centrifuge would show two bands: one heavy, one light. If it was semi-conservative, it would show a single band at an intermediate weight. When they performed the experiment, the result was clear. There was only one band, right between the two expected extremes. One generation later, the DNA split into two bands: one light, one intermediate. The semi-conservative model was correct.
Their results were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1958 and sent shockwaves through the biological sciences.
Meselson and Stahl experiment in diagram.
To me, the experiment brought to mind the work of Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian monk who, in the mid-1800s, quietly conducted his experiments in the garden of a monastery in Brno, now part of the Czech Republic. By breeding pea plants and meticulously tracking their traits over generations, Mendel discovered the basic principles of heredity, dominant and recessive traits, segregation, and independent assortment, decades before the word “gene” even existed. Like Mendel’s experiments, the Meselson-Stahl study was striking in its simplicity and clarity. Mendel revealed the rules; Meselson and Stahl uncovered the mechanism.
There’s a fantastic video where the two men discuss the experiment that is worth watching. It was produced produced by iBiology, part of the nonprofit Science Communication Lab in Berkeley. In it Meselson remembered how the intellectual climate of CalTech at the time was one of taking bold steps, not with the idea of making a profit, but for the sheer joy of discovery: “We could do whatever we wanted,” he says. “It was very unusual for such young guys to do such an important experiment.”
California Institute of Technology (Photo: Erik Olsen)
Most people think of Caltech as a temple of physics. It’s where Einstein lectured, where the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was born (CalTech still runs it), and where the gravitational waves that rippled through spacetime were detected. But Caltech has a quieter legacy in biology. Its biologists were among the first to take on the structure and function of molecules inside cells. The institute helped shape molecular biology as a new discipline at a time when biology was still often considered a descriptive science. Long before Silicon Valley made biotech a household term, breakthroughs in genetics and neurobiology were already happening in Southern California.
The Meselson-Stahl experiment is still taught in biology classrooms (my high school age daughter knew of it) because of how perfectly it answered the question it set out to ask. It was elegant, efficient, and unmistakably clear. And it showed how a well-constructed experiment can illuminate a fundamental truth. Their discovery laid the groundwork for everything from cancer research to forensic DNA analysis to CRISPR gene editing. Any time a scientist edits a gene or maps a mutation, they are relying on that basic understanding of how DNA replicates.
In a time when science often feels far too complex, messy, or inaccessible, the Meselson-Stahl experiment is a reminder that some of the most important discoveries are also the simplest. Think Occam’s Razor. Two young scientists, some nitrogen, a centrifuge, a clever idea, and a result that changed biology forever.
At Inspiration Point, Yosemite, sticky whiteleaf manzanita tends to occupy south slopes, greenleaf manzanita tends to occupy north slopes. (Photo: NPS)
As an avid hiker in Southern California, I’ve become a deep admirer of the chaparral that carpets so many of the hills and mountains in the region. When I was younger, I didn’t think much of these plants. They seemed dry, brittle, and uninviting, and they’d often leave nasty red scrapes on your legs if you ever ventured off-trail.
But I’ve come to respect them, not only because they’ve proven to be remarkably hardy, but because when you look closer, they reveal a kind of beauty I failed to appreciate when I was younger. I’ve written here and elsewhere about a few of them: the fascinating history of the toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia), also known as California holly, which likely inspired the name Hollywood and is now officially recognized as Los Angeles’ native city plant; the incredible durability of creosote bush, featured in a recent Green Planet episode with David Attenborough; and the laurel sumac, whose taco-shaped leaves help it survive the region’s brutal summer heat.
Manzanita branches in the high Sierra. The deep red colored bark enhanced by water. (Photo: Erik Olsen)
But there’s another plant I’ve come to admire, one that stands out not just for its resilience but for its deep red bark and often gnarled, sculptural form. It’s manzanita, sometimes called the Jewel of the Chaparral, and it might be one of the most quietly extraordinary plants in California.
If you’ve ever hiked a sun-baked ridge or wandered a chaparral trail, chances are you’ve brushed past a manzanita. With twisting, muscular limbs the color of stained terra cotta and bark so smooth it looks hand-polished, manzanita doesn’t just grow. It sculpts itself into the landscape, twisting and bending with the contours of hillsides, rocks, and other plants.
There are more than 60 species and subspecies of manzanita (Arctostaphylos), and most are found only in California. Some stand tall like small trees as much as 30 feet high; others crawl low along rocky slopes. But all of them are masters of survival. Their small, leathery leaves are coated with a waxy film to lock in moisture during the long dry seasons. They bloom in late winter with tiny pink or white bell-shaped flowers, feeding early pollinators when little else is flowering. By springtime, those flowers ripen into red fruits: the “little apples” that give the plant its name.
Manzanita flowers (Santa Barbara Botanical Garden)
One of manzanita’s more fascinating traits is how it deals with dead wood. Instead of dropping old branches, it often retains them, letting new growth seal off or grow around the dead tissue. You’ll see branches striped with gray and red, or dead limbs still anchored to the plant. It’s a survival strategy, conserving water, limiting exposure, and creating the twisted, sculptural forms that make manzanita distinctive.
And fire is key to understanding manzanita’s world. Like many California plants, many manzanita species are fire-adapted: some die in flames but leave behind seeds that only germinate after exposure to heat or smoke. Others resprout from underground burls after burning. Either way, manzanita is often one of the first plants to return to the land after a wildfire, along with laurel sumac, stabilizing the soil, feeding animals (and people), and shading the way for the next wave of regrowth.
Manzanita’s astonishing red bark The reddish color of manzanita bark is primarily due to tannins, naturally occurring compounds that also contribute to the bark’s bitter taste and deter insects and other organisms from feeding on it. (Photo: NPS)
Botanically, manzanitas are a bit of a mystery. They readily hybridize and evolve in isolation, which means there are tiny populations of hyper-local species, some found only on a single hill or canyon slope. That makes them incredibly interesting to scientists and especially vulnerable to development and climate change.
Their red bark is the result of high concentrations of tannins, bitter compounds that serve as a natural defense. Tannins are present in many plants like oaks, walnuts and grapes, and in manzanitas, they make the bark unpalatable to insects and animals and help resist bacteria, fungi, and decay. The bark often peels away in thin sheets, shedding microbes and exposing fresh layers underneath. It’s a protective skin, both chemical and physical, built for survival in the dry, fire-prone landscapes of California.
Whiteleaf manzanita leaves and berries (Photo: NPS)
The plants still have mysteries that are being uncovered. For example, a new species of manzanita was only just discovered in early 2024, growing in a rugged canyon in San Diego County. Named Arctostaphylos nipumu to honor the Nipomo Mesa where it was discovered and its indigenous heritage, it had gone unnoticed despite being located just 35 miles from the coast and not far from populated areas. The discovery, announced by botanists at UC Riverside, highlights that unique species localization, as the plants are found sometimes growing only on a single ridge or in a specific type of soil. Unfortunately, this newly identified species is already at risk due to development pressures and habitat loss. According to researchers, only about 50 individuals are known to exist in the wild, making A. nipumu one of California’s rarest native plants, and a reminder that the story of manzanita is still unfolding, even in places we think we know well.
A new species of manzanita – A. nipumu – was discovered in San Diego County last year (2024), surprising reserachers. (Photo: UCR)
For hikers, photographers, and anyone with an eye for the unusual, manzanita is a cool plant to stumble upon. I will often stop and admire a particularly striking plant. I love when its smooth bark peels back in delicate curls, looking like sunburned skin or shavings of polished cinnamon. It’s hard to walk past a manzanita without reaching out to touch that smooth, cool bark. That irresistible texture may not serve any evolutionary purpose for the plant, but it’s one more reason to wander into California’s fragrant chaparral, where more species of manzanita grow than anywhere else on Earth.
Images from the most powerful astronomical discovery machine ever created, and built in California
A breathtaking zoomed-in glimpse of the cosmos: this first image from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory reveals a deep field crowded with galaxies, offering just a taste of the observatory’s power to map the universe in unprecedented detail. (Credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory)
I woke up this morning to watch a much-anticipated press conference about the release of the first images from the Vera Rubin Telescope and Observatory. It left me flabbergasted: not just for what we saw today, but for what is still to come. The images weren’t just beautiful; they hinted at a decade of discovery that could reshape what we know about the cosmos.I just finished watching and have to catch my breath. What lies ahead is very, very exciting.
The first images released today mark the observatory’s “first light,” the ceremonial debut of a new telescope. These images are the result of decades of effort by a vast and diverse global team who together helped build one of the most advanced scientific instruments ever constructed. In the presser, Željko Ivezić, Director of the Rubin Observatory and the guy who revealed the first images, called it “the greatest astronomical discovery machine ever built.”
This image combines 678 separate images taken by NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in just over seven hours of observing time. Combining many images in this way clearly reveals otherwise faint or invisible details, such as the clouds of gas and dust that comprise the Trifid nebula (top) and the Lagoon nebula, which are several thousand light-years away from Earth. (Credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory)
The images shown today are a mere hors d’oeuvre of what’s to come, and you could tell by the enthusiasm and giddiness of the scientists involved how excited they are about what lies ahead. Here’s a clip of Željko Ivezić as the presser ended. It made me laugh.
So, that first image you can see above. Check out the detail. What would normally be perceived as black, empty space to us star-gazing earthlings shows anything but. It shows that in each tiny patch of sky, if you look deep enough, galaxies and stars are out there blazing. If you know the famous Hubble Deep Field image, later expanded by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, you may already be aware that there is no such thing as empty sky. The universe contains so much stuff, it is truly impossible for our brains (or at least my brain) to comprehend. Vera Rubin will improve our understanding of what’s out there and what we’ve seen before by orders of magnitude.
This image captures a small section of NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s view of the Virgo Cluster, revealing both the grand scale and the faint details of this dynamic region of the cosmos. Bright stars from our own Milky Way shine in the foreground, while a sea of distant reddish galaxies speckle the background. (Credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory)
I’ve been following the Rubin Observatory for years, ever since I first spoke with engineers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory about the digital camera they were building for a potential story for an episode of the PBS show NOVA that I produced (sadly, the production timeline ultimately didn’t work out). SLAC is one of California’s leading scientific institutions, known for groundbreaking work across fields from particle physics to astrophysics. (We wrote about it a while back.)
The night sky seen from inside the Vera Rubin Observatory (Credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory)
Now fully assembled atop Chile’s Cerro Pachón, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is beginning its incredible and ambitious mission. Today’s presser focused on unveiling the first images captured by its groundbreaking camera, offering an early glimpse of the observatory’s vast potential. At the heart of the facility is SLAC’s creation: the world’s largest digital camera, a 3.2-gigapixel behemoth developed by the U.S. Department of Energy.
This extraordinary instrument is the central engine of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a decade-long sky survey designed to study dark energy, dark matter, and the changing night sky with unprecedented precision and frequency. We are essentially creating a decade-long time-lapse of the universe in detail that has never been captured before, revealing the dynamic cosmos in ways previously impossible. Over the course of ten years, it will catalog 37 billion individual astronomical objects, returning to observe each one every three nights to monitor changes, movements, and events across the sky. I want to learn more about how Artificial Intelligence and machine learning are being brought to bear to help scientists understand what they are seeing.
The camera, over 5 feet tall and weighing about three tons, took more than a decade to build. Its focal plane is 64 cm wide-roughly the size of a small coffee table-and consists of 189 custom-designed charge-coupled devices (CCDs) stitched together in a highly precise mosaic. These sensors operate at cryogenic temperatures to reduce noise and can detect the faintest cosmic light, comparable to spotting a candle from thousands of miles away.
The LSST Camera was moved from the summit clean room and attached to the camera rotator for the first time in February 2025. (Credit: RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/DOE/NSF/AURA)
Rubin’s camera captures a massive 3.5-degree field of view-more than most telescopes can map in a single shot. That’s about seven times the area of the full moon. Each image takes just 15 seconds to capture and only two seconds to download. A single Rubin image contains roughly as much data as all the words The New York Times has published since 1851. The observatory will generate about 20 terabytes of raw data every night, which will be transmitted via a high-speed 600 Gbps link to processing centers in California, France, and the UK. The data will then be routed through SLAC’s U.S. Data Facility for full analysis.
The complete focal plane of the future LSST Camera is more than 2 feet wide and contains 189 individual sensors that will produce 3,200-megapixel images. Crews at SLAC have now taken the first images with it. Explore them in full resolution using the links at the bottom of the press release. (Credit: Jacqueline Orrell/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)
The images produced will be staggering in both detail and scale. Each exposure will be sharp enough to reveal distant galaxies, supernovae, near-Earth asteroids, and other transient cosmic phenomena in real time. By revisiting the same patches of sky repeatedly, the Rubin Observatory will produce an evolving map of the dynamic universe-something no previous observatory has achieved at this scale.
What sets Rubin apart from even the giants like Hubble or James Webb is its speed, scope, and focus on change over time. Where Hubble peers deeply at narrow regions of space and Webb focuses on the early universe in infrared, Rubin will cast a wide and persistent net, watching the night sky for what moves, vanishes, appears, or explodes. It’s designed not just to look, but to watch. Just imaging the kind of stuff we will see!
The LSST Camera’s imaging sensors are grouped into units called “rafts.” Twenty-one square rafts, each with nine sensors, will capture science images, while four smaller rafts with three sensors each handle focus and telescope alignment. (Credit: Farrin Abbott/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)
This means discoveries won’t just be about what is out there, but what happens out there. Astronomers expect Rubin to vastly expand our knowledge of dark matter by observing how mass distorts space through gravitational lensing. It will also help map dark energy by charting the expansion of the universe with unprecedented precision. Meanwhile, its real-time scanning will act as a planetary defense system, spotting potentially hazardous asteroids headed toward Earth.
But the magic lies in the possibility of the unexpected. Rubin may detect rare cosmic collisions, unknown types of supernovae, or entirely new classes of astronomical phenomena. Over ten years, it’s expected to generate more than 60 petabytes of data-more than any other optical astronomy project to date. Scientists across the globe are already preparing for the data deluge, building machine learning tools to help sift through the torrent of discovery.
And none of it would be possible without SLAC’s camera. A triumph of optics, engineering, and digital sensor technology, the camera is arguably one of the most complex and capable scientific instruments ever built. I don’t care if you’re a Canon or a Sony person, this is way beyond all that. It’s a monument to what happens when curiosity meets collaboration, with California’s innovation engine powering the view.
As first light filters through the Rubin Observatory’s massive mirror and into SLAC’s camera, we are entering a new era of astronomy-one where the universe is not just observed, but filmed, in exquisite, evolving detail. This camera won’t just capture stars. It will reveal how the universe dances.
