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.

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.

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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San Clemente Island is Where War Games and Wildlife Coexist

Loggerhead Shrike (Photo: US Fish and Wildlife Service)

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A few months ago, I took a fishing trip out to the western side of San Clemente Island. I woke at two in the morning to the rattle of the anchor chain dropping and stepped out onto the deck, expecting darkness all around us. Instead the night was alive with a strange glow. Dozens of squid boats floated offshore, their powerful lights illuminating the water with a bluish, Avatar-like brightness. The lights draw squid toward the surface before the crews scoop them up in nets.

As I knew from earlier research, and from being a long-time California resident, squid are one of California’s top commercial fisheries, a multimillion-dollar industry built around what is known as market squid. They thrive in enormous numbers in the deep waters around the Channel Islands and up toward Santa Barbara, even though the average beachgoer rarely thinks about them. From the rail of the fishing boat I was I could see vast swarms just below the surface.

Squid boat off shore San Clemente Island (Photo: Erik Olsen)

When dawn broke, San Clemente Island emerged ahead of us, and I was struck by how stark and empty it looked. In both directions stretched the same raw, rugged coastline, with almost no sign of human presence (there were what appeared to be radio towers on the top of a peak, but no people).

It felt desolate and otherworldly. But the reality is more complicated.

The island is part of the Channel Islands, a chain that trends east to west rather than the usual north–south pattern of most California ranges. The Channel Islands are often called North America’s Galápagos because they support an extraordinary number of species found nowhere else, shaped by the deep isolation that defines island biogeography (we wrote about this earlier).

San Clemente is no exception. The island is abundant in wildlife, with its own collection of rare plants and animals. But what makes it stand apart from the other islands is the scale of the military activity just beyond the barren cliffs. The U.S. Navy conducts constant training here, including missile tests, amphibious landings, and live-fire exercises. The island is considered one of the most important training grounds for the United States military, operating around the clock even as endangered species cling to survival in the canyons and plateaus nearby.

San Clemente Island looks like a long volcanic ridge from offshore, but it has been one of the most important and least visible military landscapes in California for almost a century. It is the southernmost of the Channel Islands and has been owned entirely by the U.S. Navy since the late 1930s. Over time it became a central part of Naval Base Coronado, and today its main airfield supports helicopters, jets, drones, and special operations teams that rotate through the island throughout the year.

It all seemed really interesting. I desperately wanted to go ashore, but if I’d tried, I almost certainly would have been arrested.

Live fire training exercises with mortars on San Clemente Island Photo: (Spc. William Franco Espinosa / U.S. Army National Guard)

The island began shaping military history just before World War II. In 1939, naval engineers brought early versions of the Higgins boat to San Clemente Island to test how they handled surf, wind, and timing with naval gunfire. These flat-bottomed landing craft became essential to Allied victories in places like Normandy and Guadalcanal. The island’s rugged shoreline helped the US military refine the tactics behind the amphibious assaults that defined twentieth century warfare.

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During the Cold War, San Clemente Island evolved into one of the Navy’s busiest live fire training sites. The waters around Pyramid Cove hosted decommissioned ships used as targets. Carrier air wings practiced bombing runs across the southern plateau. Marine units rehearsed ship-to-shore landings on isolated beaches, while submarines conducted simulated missions under restricted airspace. We did a short video you can watch here.

Few places on the West Coast allowed sea, air, and land forces to operate together with real weapons, and the island’s remoteness made it ideal for rehearsing missions that couldn’t take place near populated coastlines. Yet all of this is happening just about 60 miles offshore from Los Angeles. (It took us about five hours to get back).

Civilian access has always been extremely limited, which is why the island only reaches the news when something unusual happens. One widely reported event occurred in 2023, when a private pilot illegally landed a small plane on the island’s runway and then stole a Navy truck before being detained. He tried again in 2025. This kind of thing underscores how isolated and tightly controlled the installation is. For the most part, the only people who ever set foot on the island are service members using it as a sophisticated, real world training environment.

Oh, and scientists, too.

That’s because the island’s natural history has been studied intensively. Decades ago, ranching introduced goats, sheep, and invasive plants that stripped vegetation from entire hillsides. Feral cats and rats preyed greedily on ground nesting birds, and live fire exercises fragmented habitat. By the 1970s and 1980s, San Clemente Island held one of the highest concentrations of endangered species in California, but everything was under threat.

San Clemente Island looks otherworldly and barren from a fishing boat (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Enter the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which worked with the military to balance military readiness with the legal requirements of the Endangered Species Act. And it’s been, by many measures, a pretty major success.

No species became more symbolic of the struggle to protect the island than the San Clemente loggerhead shrike, a lovely, black masked songbird that lives nowhere else on Earth. By the late 1990s its wild population had fallen to as few as fourteen individuals. The Navy funded a comprehensive recovery effort that included captive breeding, predator removal, and habitat reconstruction, all with the expertise help of the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. By restoring vegetation and extensive breeding, scientists released shrikes which eventually began to hunt, build territories, and raise their young. The species is now considered one of the most successful island bird recoveries in North America.

The San Clemente Island fox, once threatened by habitat loss and predation, has rebounded significantly thanks to intensive conservation efforts that stabilized its population and restored its native ecosystem. (Photo: USFWS)

And that wasn’t the only success. Once goats and sheep were removed, native shrubs and herbs began returning to the island. Endemic plants such as the San Clemente Island lotus and San Clemente Island paintbrush, responded quickly once the pressure from grazing disappeared. In 2023, after decades of habitat recovery, the Fish and Wildlife Service announced that five island species were healthy enough to be removed from the endangered species list, a pretty cool milestone that suggested a major ecological turnaround for San Clemente and the Channel Islands as a whole.

San Clemente Island lotus (Photo: USFWS)

Today, San Clemente Island remains one of the most unusual places in California. It is a live fire training range where carrier groups, SEAL teams, and Marines rehearse some of the most complex operations in the Navy. It is also a refuge where rare birds and plants have recovered after hovering near extinction. Conservation biologists and military planners now coordinate schedules, field surveys, and habitat protections to keep both missions intact. There’s an excellent documentary on this recovery effort made by SoCal PBS.

California has become a national leader in restoring damaged ecosystems. And while the state has lost much of its original wildness over the centuries, it also offers some of the most compelling examples of species and habitats recovered from the brink. San Clemente Island is more ecologically stable today than at any point in the past century, and it continues to serve as one of the Navy’s most valuable training grounds.

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The Myth of the 100-foot Whale

Blue whale off the California coast. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Not So Big: How We Overstate the Length of the Blue Whale, Earth’s Largest Creature

One of the most extraordinary privileges of living in California, especially near the coast, is witnessing the annual arrival of blue whales. I’ve been at sea on several occasions when these giants surfaced nearby, and to see one in person, or even through my drone RC, is astonishing and unforgettable. I once had the rare and mind-blowing opportunity to swim with and film blue whales off the southern tip of Sri Lanka for a story I wrote and produced, an experience that will forever be seared into memory.

For decades, the blue whale has been celebrated as the largest creature ever to exist (Bigger than dinosaurs! True.), with many popular accounts claiming that these animals can reach lengths of 100 feet or more. Yet in all the videos, photographs, and encounters I’ve seen, not a single whale has come close to that. Still, article after article and documentary after documentary continues to repeat the claim that blue whales “reach 100 feet or more.” Nearly every whale-watching company in California repeats the claim, echoed endlessly across Instagram and TikTok.

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But is it true? Most blue whales I’ve seen off the coast of California are half that size or maybe 2/3. It felt misleading to say so otherwise. And so I did a lot of digging: reading, reaching out to experts, poring over historical records, and the fact is that no single blue whale has ever been scientifically measured at 100 feet. Close, as you will soon read, but not 100 feet or more. Especially not off the coast of California.

This discrepancy not only distorts our understanding of these magnificent creatures, but also highlights the broader issue of how media can shape and sometimes mislead public perception of scientific facts.

Blue whale tail fluke in Sri Lanka. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

In other words: the perception that blue whales commonly reach lengths of 100 feet or more likely stems from a combination of historical anecdotes, estimation errors, and a tendency to highlight extreme examples.

All that said, the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) is a truly magnificent creature. Hunted nearly to extinction in the 17th to 19th centuries, the blue whale has staged a hopeful recovery in the last five decades, since commercial whaling was outlawed by the international community in 1966 (although some Soviet whale hunting continued into the early 1970s). And California, in particular, has been blessed with the annual appearance of the largest population of blue whales in the world, called the Eastern North Pacific population, consisting of some 2,000 animals. That population makes an annual migration from the warm waters of Baja California to Alaska and back every year. This is the group I’ve seen off Newport Beach.

These numbers are painfully, tragically small compared to what existed before commercial whaling began. Prior to that, it was estimated that there were some 400,000 blue whales on earth. 360,000 were killed in the Antarctic alone. (IMO: this stands as one of the most shameful acts in human history).

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The International Union for Conservation of Nature estimates that there are probably between 5,000 to 15,000 blue whales worldwide today, divided among some five separate populations or groups, including the Eastern North Pacific population. Many now swim so close to shore that an entire whale-watching industry has flourished along the California coast, especially in the south, with many former fishing boats converted into whale-watching vessels..

But back to size, or, more specifically, length: there are two credible references in scientific papers of blue whales that are near 100 feet. The first is a measurement dating back to 1937. This was at an Antarctic whaling station where the animal was said to measure 98 feet. But even that figure is shrouded in some suspicion. First of all, 1937 was a long time ago, and while the size of a foot or meter has not changed, a lot of record-keeping during that time is suspect, as whales were not measured using standard zoological measurement techniques (see below). The 98-foot specimen was recorded by Lieut. Quentin R. Walsh of the US Coast Guard, who was acting as a whaling inspector of the factory ship Ulysses. Sadly, there is scant detail available about this measurement and it remains suspect in the scientific community.

Blue whale in Sri Lanka. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

The second is from a book and a 1973 paper by the late biologist Dale W. Rice, who references a single female in Antarctica whose “authenticated” measurement was also 98 feet. The measurement was conducted by the late Japanese biologist Masaharu Nishiwaki. Nishiwaki and Rice were friends, and while both are deceased, a record of their correspondence exists in a collection of Rice’s papers held by Sally Mizroch, co-trustee of the Dale W. Rice Research Library in Seattle. Reached by email, Dr. Mizroch said that Nishiwaki, who died in 1984, was a very well-respected scientist and that the figure he cited should be treated as reliable.

According to Mizroch, who has reviewed many of the Antarctic whaling records from the whaling era, whales were often measured in pieces after they were cut up, which greatly introduces the possibility for error. That is likely not the case with the 98-foot measurement, which took place in 1947 at a whaling station in Antarctica where Nishiwaki was stationed as a scientific observer.

Proper scientific measurements, the so-called “standard method”, are taken by using a straight line from the tip of the snout to the notch in the tail flukes. This technique was likely not used until well into the 20th century, said Mizroch. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1940s that the use of a metal tape measure became commonplace. According to Dan Bortolotti, author of Wild Blue: A Natural History of the World’s Largest Animal, many of the larger whales in the whaling records — especially those said to be over 100 feet — were probably measured incorrectly or even deliberately exaggerated because bonus money was paid to whalers based on the size of the animal caught.

So, according to the best records we have, the largest blue whale ever properly measured was 98 feet long. Granted, 98 feet is close to 100 feet, but it’s not 100 feet, and it’s certainly not over 100 feet, as so many otherwise reputable references state.

So, setting aside the fact that so many sources say the blue whale has reached 100 feet or more, and that there is no scientific evidence proving this, a key question to ask is how large can whales become?

Blue whale from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Most baleen whales are so-called lunge feeders. They open their mouths wide and lunge at prey like krill or copepods, drawing in hundreds of pounds of food at a time. Lunge-feeding baleen whales, it turns out, are wonderfully efficient feeders. The larger they become, the larger their gulps are, and the more food they draw in. But they also migrate vast distances, and oftentimes have to dive deep to find prey, both of which consume a large amount of energy.

A 2019 scientific paper in Science described how a team of researchers used an ocean-going Fitbit-like tag to track whales’ foraging patterns, hoping to measure the animals’ energetic efficiency, or the total amount of energy gained from foraging, relative to the energy expended in finding and consuming prey. The team concluded that there are likely ecological limits to how large a whale can become and that maximum size in filter feeders “is likely constrained by prey availability across space and time.” That is especially the case in today’s era, when overfishing and illegal fishing, including krill harvesting in Antarctica, have reduced the amount of prey available even in regions that used to be very prolific.

Whale fall off the California Coast (Ocean Exploration Trust)

John Calambokidis, a Senior Research Biologist and co-founder of Cascadia Research, a non-profit research organization formed in 1979 based in Olympia, Washington, has studied blue whales up and down the West Coast for decades. He told California Curated that the persistent use of the 100-foot figure can be misleading, especially when the number is used as a reference to blue whales off the coast of California.

The sizes among different blue whale groups differ significantly depending on their location around the globe. Antarctic whales tend to be much bigger, largely due to the amount of available food in cold Southern waters. The blue whales we see off the coast of California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska, are part of a different group from those in Antarctica. They differ both morphologically and genetically, and they consume different types and quantities of food. North Pacific blue whales, our whales, tend to be smaller and likely have always been so. Calambokidis believes that the chances any blue whales off the West Coast of the US ever reaching anything close to 100 feet is “almost non-existent”.

I emailed Regina Asmutis-Silvia, Executive Director North America of Whale and Dolphin Conservation, to ask about this discrepancy among so many seemingly authoritative outlets. She wrote: “While it appears biologically possible for blue whales to reach or exceed lengths of 100’, the current (and limited) photogrammetry data suggest that the larger blue whales which have been more recently sampled are under 80 feet.” Photogrammetry is the process of using several photos of an object — like a blue whale — to extract a three-dimensional measurement from two-dimensional data. It is widely used in biology, as well as engineering, architecture, and many other disciplines. Photogrammetry measurements are now often acquired by drones and have proven to be a more accurate means of measuring whale size at sea.

Here’s a key point: In the early part of the 20th century and before, whales were measured by whalers for the purpose of whaling, not measured by scientists for the purpose of science. Again, none of this is to say that blue whales aren’t gargantuan animals. They are massive and magnificent, but if we are striving for precision, it is not accurate to declare, as so many articles and other media do, that blue whales reach lengths of 100 feet or more. Or to insinuate that this size is in any way common. This is not to say it’s impossible that whales grew to or above 100 feet, it’s that, according to the scientific records, none ever has.

A relevant point from Dr. Asmutis-Silvia about the early days of Antarctic whaling: “Given that whales are long-lived and we don’t know at what age each species reaches its maximum length, it is possible that we took some very big, very old whales before we started to measure what we were taking.”

In an email exchange with Jeremy Goldbogen, the scientist at Stanford who authored the study in Science above, he says that measurements with drones off California “have been as high as 26 meters” or 85 feet.

So, why does nearly every citation online and elsewhere regularly cite the 100-foot number? It probably has to do with our love of superlatives and round numbers. We have a deep visceral NEED to be able to say that such and such animal is the biggest or the heaviest or the smallest or whatever. And, when it comes down to it, 100 feet is a nice round number that rolls easily off the tongue or typing fingers.

All said, blue whales remain incredible and incredibly large animals, and deserve our appreciation and protection. Their impressive rebound over the last half-century is to be widely celebrated, but let’s not, in the spirit of scientific inquiry, overstate their magnificence. They are magnificent enough.

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California Is a Nobel Powerhouse

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You can keep your Oscars, Emmys, Grammys, and Tonys. Take your Pulitzers, Bookers, and Peabodys, too. Even the Pritzker and the Fields Medal don’t quite measure up. For me, nothing competes with the Nobel Prize as a symbol that someone has truly changed the world.

I’m not a scientist, but my mind lives in that space. Science, more than anything else, runs the world and reshapes it. This newsletter was born out of my fascination with how things work and the quiet mechanics behind the visible world and my love for all that California has to offer in the way of innovation and natural beauty. I love standing in front of something familiar and asking: why? how? what exactly is going on here? And nothing satisfies that intense curiosity more than science.

That said, I’ve never loved the word science. It feels cold and sometimes intimidating, as if it applies to people in lab coats and not to everyone else. I kinda wish there were a better word for that spirit of discovery that lives in all of us. Maybe it’s wonder. Maybe curiosity. I dunno. “Science” turns people off sometimes, unfortunately.

Whatever you call it, the Nobel Prize represents the highest acknowledgment of that pursuit. It is the world’s way of saying: this mattered. This changed something. And there are few places (if any) on Earth that can rival California when it comes to the number of people who have earned that honor.

This year, 2025, was no different. Three of the Nobel Prizes announced this week carried California fingerprints, adding to a tradition that stretches back more than a century.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine came first. It went to Mary Brunkow, Shimon Sakaguchi, and Fred Ramsdell, the last of whom studied at UCLA and UC San Diego. (In epic California fashion, Ramsdell, who studied at UCLA and UC San Diego, didn’t even learn he’d become a Nobel laureate until after returning from a trip deep into the Wyoming wilderness, where he’d been out of contact with the outside world. What’s more Californian than that?) Their research on regulatory T cells explained how the immune system knows when to attack and when to stand down. Ramsdell’s discovery of a key gene that controls these cells has transformed how scientists think about autoimmune disease and organ transplantation.

Next came the Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to John Clarke of UC Berkeley, Michel H. Devoret of UC Santa Barbara and Yale, and John M. Martinis of UC Santa Barbara (big shout out to UCSB!). Their award honored pioneering work that revealed how the strange laws of quantum mechanics can be seen in circuits large enough to hold in your hand. Beginning in Clarke’s Berkeley lab in the 1980s, the trio built superconducting loops that behaved like subatomic particles, “tunneling” and flipping between quantum energy states. Those experiments helped create the foundation for today’s quantum computers.

The Chemistry Prize followed a day later, shared by Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi of UC Berkeley for discoveries in metal–organic frameworks, or MOFs. These are crystalline materials so porous that a single gram can hold an entire roomful of gas (mind blown). MOFs are now used to capture carbon dioxide, filter water, and even pull drinking water from desert air. Yaghi’s Berkeley lab coined the term “reticular chemistry” to describe this new molecular architecture. His work has become one of California’s most important contributions to the climate sciences.

California Institute of Technology (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Those three announcements in as many days lit up California’s scientific community, has garnered many headlines and carried on a tradition that has made the state one of the world’s most reliable engines of Nobel-level discovery.

The University of California system now counts 74 Nobel Prizes among its faculty and researchers. 23 in physics and 16 in chemistry. Berkeley leads the list, with 26 laureates, followed by UC San Diego, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and UC San Francisco. Even smaller campuses, such as UC Riverside, have ties to winners like Barry Barish, who shared the 2017 Nobel in Physics for detecting gravitational waves.

Linus Pauling with an inset of his Nobel Prize in 1955 (Wikipedia – public domain)

Caltech, which I have written about extensively and is quite close to my own home, counts 47 Nobel laureates (faculty, alumni, or postdocs). Its history is the stuff of legend. In 1923, Robert Millikan won for measuring the charge of the electron. In 1954, Linus Pauling received the Chemistry Prize for explaining the nature of the chemical bond. He later won the Peace Prize for his anti-nuclear activism, making him the only person to win two unshared Nobels.

Stanford University sits not far behind, with 36 Nobel winners in its history and about 20 currently active in its community. From the development of transistors and lasers to modern work in medicine and economics, Stanford’s laureates have changed the modern world in ways that is impossible to quantify, but profound in their impact.

These numbers tell a clear story: since the mid-twentieth century, about one in every four Nobel Prizes in the sciences awarded to Americans has gone to researchers based at California institutions, an extraordinary concentration of curiosity, intellect, and ambition within a single state.

University of California Santa Barbara (Photo: Erik Olsen)

California’s Nobel dominance began early. In the 1930s, UC Berkeley’s Ernest Lawrence invented the cyclotron, a device that would transform physics and eventually medicine. Caltech, meanwhile, became a magnet for the world’s brightest physicists and chemists.

Over the decades, California’s universities turned their focus to molecular biology, biochemistry, and genetics. In the 1980s, the state’s physicists and engineers drove advances in lasers, semiconductors, and now, quantum circuits. And as biotechnology rose, San Diego and the Bay Area became ground zero for breakthroughs in medicine and life sciences. One of the great moments in genetics took place in Asilomar on the coast.

Nobel Museum in Stockholm, Sweden (Photo: Erik Olsen)

This is all about more than geography and climate (although those are a big sell, for sure). California’s research institutions kick ass because they operate as ecosystems rather than islands. Berkeley physicists collaborate with engineers at Stanford. Caltech chemists trade ideas with biotech firms in San Diego. Graduate students drift between labs, startups, and national research centers like Lawrence Livermore and JPL. The boundaries between university and industry blur, with campuses like Stanford turning breakthrough discoveries into thriving commercial ventures (look how many of our big tech brains came out of Stanford). In California, research doesn’t end in the lab, it often turns into companies, technologies, and treatments that generate both knowledge and enormous economic value. Just look at AI today.

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I think the secret is cultural. Over the years, I’ve lived on the East coast for almost two decades, and abroad for several as well, and nothing compares to the California vibe. California has never been afraid of big risks. Its scientists are encouraged to chase questions that might take decades to answer (see our recent story on just this idea). There’s an openness to uncertainty here that works well in the natural sciences, but can also be found in Hollywood, Silicon Valley and, of course, space exploration.

When next year’s round of early morning calls comes from Stockholm, it is a good bet that someone in California will pick up. Maybe a physicist in Pasadena, a chemist in Berkeley, or a physician in La Jolla. Maybe they’ll pick up the phone in bed, maybe a text from a spouse while camping, or on a morning jog. That’s when a Swedish-accented voice tells them that the world has just caught up to what they’ve been quietly building for years.

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The Unsung California Labs That Powered the Digital Revolution

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory working with the Big Aperture Thulium (BAT) laser system, part of the laser and plasma research that laid the groundwork for generating the extreme ultraviolet light at the heart of today’s most advanced chipmaking machines. (Photo: Jason Laurea/LLNL)

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When I started this Website, my hope was to share California’s astonishing range of landscapes, laboratories, and ideas. This state is overflowing with scientific discovery and natural marvels, and I want readers to understand, and enjoy, how unusually fertile this state is for discovery. If you’re not curious about the world, then this Website is definitely not for you. If you are, then I hope you get something out of it when you step outside and look around.

I spend a lot of time in the California mountains and at sea, and I am endlessly amazed by the natural world at our doorstep. I am also fascinated by California’s industrial past, the way mining, oil, and agriculture built its wealth, and how it later became a cradle for the technologies and industries now driving human society forward. Of course, some people see technologies like gene editing and AI as existential risks. I’m an optimist. I see tools that, while potentially dangerous, used wisely, expand what is possible.

An aerial view of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1960, when the Cold War spurred rapid expansion of America’s nuclear and scientific research campus east of San Francisco Bay. (Photo: LLNL Public Domain)

Today’s story turns toward technology, and one breakthrough in particular that has reshaped the modern world. It is not just in the phone in your pocket, but in the computers that train artificial intelligence, in advanced manufacturing, and in the systems that keep the entire digital economy running. The technology is extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV). And one of the most important points I want to leave you with is that the origins of EUV are not found in Silicon Valley startups or corporate boardrooms but in California’s national laboratories, where government-funded science made the impossible possible.

This article is not a political argument, though it comes at a time when government funding is often questioned or dismissed. My purpose is to underscore how much California’s national labs have accomplished and to affirm their value.

This story begins in the late 1980s and 1990s, when it became clear that if Moore’s Law was going to hold, chipmakers would need shorter and shorter wavelengths of light to keep shrinking transistors. Extreme ultraviolet light, or EUV, sits way beyond the visible spectrum, at a wavelength far shorter than ordinary ultraviolet lamps. That short wavelength makes it possible to draw patterns on silicon at the tiniest scales…and I mean REALLY tiny.

Ernest Orlando Lawrence at the controls of the 37-inch cyclotron in 1938. A Nobel Prize–winning physicist and co-founder of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lawrence’s legacy in nuclear science and high-energy research paved the way for the laboratory’s later breakthroughs in lasers and plasma physics — work that ultimately fed into the extreme ultraviolet light sources now powering the world’s most advanced chipmaking machines. (LLNL Public Domain)

At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, researchers with expertise in lasers and plasmas were tasked with figuring out how to generate a powerful, reliable source of extreme ultraviolet light for chipmaking. Their solution was to fire high-energy laser pulses at microscopic droplets of tin, creating a superheated plasma that emits at just the right (tiny) wavelength for etching circuits onto silicon.

The movement of light on mirrors in an ASML EUV lithography machine. More on it below.

Generating the light was only the first step. To turn it into a working lithography system required other national labs to solve equally daunting problems. Scientists at Berkeley’s Center for X Ray Optics developed multilayer mirrors that could reflect the right slice of light with surprising efficiency. A branch of Sandia National Laboratories located in Livermore, California, worked on the pieces that translate light into patterns. So, in all: Livermore built and tested exposure systems, Berkeley measured and perfected optics and materials, and Sandia helped prove that the whole chain could run as a single machine.

Each EUV lithography machine is about the size of a bus, costs more than $150 million, and shipping one requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks. (Photo: ASML)

It matters that this happened in public laboratories. The labs had the patient funding and the unusual mix of skills to attempt something that might not pay off for many years. The Department of Energy supported the facilities and the people. DARPA helped connect the labs with industry partners and kept the effort moving when it was still risky. There was no guarantee that the plasma would be bright enough, that the mirrors would reflect cleanly, or that the resists (the light-sensitive materials coated onto silicon wafers) would behave. The national labs could take that on because they are designed to tackle long horizon problems that industry would otherwise avoid.

Only later did private industry scale the laboratory breakthroughs into the giant tools that now anchor modern chip factories. The Dutch company ASML became the central player, building the scanners that move wafers with incredible precision under the fragile EUV light. Those systems are now capable of etching transistor features as small as 5 nanometers…5 billionths of a meter. You really can’t even use the “smaller than a human hair” comparison here since human hair variation is so large at this scale as to render that comparison kind of useless. However, many people still do.

The ASML machines are marvels of tech and engineering. Truly amazing feats human design. And they integrate subsystems from all over the world: Zeiss in Germany manufactures the mirrors, polished to near-atomic perfection, while San Diego’s Cymer (now part of ASML) supplies the laser-driven plasma light sources. The technology is so complex that a single scanner involves hundreds of thousands of components and takes months to assemble.

ASML’s EXE:5000 High-NA EUV lithography machine — a room-sized tool that etches the tiniest features on the world’s most advanced computer chips. (ASML)

It was TSMC and Samsung that then poured billions of dollars into making these tools reliable at scale, building the factories that now turn EUV light into the chips powering AI and smartphones and countless other devices. Trillions of dollars are at stake. Some say the fate of humanity lies in balance should Artificial General Intelligence eventually emerge (again, I don’t say that, but some do). All of this grew from the ingenuity and perseverance, along with the public funding, that sustained these California labs.

It’s disappointing that many of the companies profiting most from these technological breakthroughs are not based in the United States, even though the core science was proven here in California. That is fodder for a much longer essay, and perhaps even for a broader conversation about national industrial policy, something the CHIPS Act is only beginning to deal with.

However, if you look closely at the architecture of those monster machines, you can still see the fingerprints of the California work. A tin plasma for the light. Vacuum chambers that keep the beam alive. Reflective optics that never existed at this level before EUV research made them possible.

A photorealistic rendering of an advanced microprocessor, etched in silicon with extreme ultraviolet light — the kind of breakthrough technology pioneered in U.S. national labs, but now fabricated almost entirely in Taiwan, where the future of digital society is being made.

We often celebrate garages, founders, and the venture playbook. Those are real parts of the California story. This is a different part, just as important. The laboratories in Livermore, Berkeley, and Sandia are public assets. They exist because voters and policymakers chose to fund places where hard problems can be worked on for as long as it takes. The payoff can feel distant at first, then suddenly it is in your pocket. Like EUV. Years of quiet experiments on lasers, mirrors, and materials became the hidden machinery of the digital age.

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