Cool sunlight slowly crept down from the horizon to the kelp beds off La Jolla in southern California. I took another sip of coffee. Sea lions barked on occasion as small groups of pelicans flew up the coast to start their day.
We considered moving the 2020 show to later in the year, but ultimately decided that postponing the show still held too much uncertainty. The wellbeing of everyone under our roof is our primary concern, and there's no way to responsibly hold an event of this size and with people from around the world for the foreseeable future.
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Warm rinse water sloshed in the jug as my car hugged a sharp turn on California’s Pacific Coast Highway. I looked left at the mighty Pacific Ocean, the cliffs tumbling to the sea dotted by rugged pinnacles, stretching farther up the coast than the jam band solo currently playing out of the car speakers. Deep blue, favorable conditions all week, minimal swell, no-wind forecast—only unpredictable visibility could affect the diving today.
According to a new study published in the Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene journal, the processing of Alaskan pollock into fish sticks, imitation crab, and fish fillets generates nearly twice the emissions produced by fishing itself.
San Diego’s Wreck Alley is an area with intentionally sunken ships. One of the wrecks divers can find here is the HMCS Yukon, which was a Mackenzie-class destroyer that served in the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) and later the Canadian Forces. She was named after the Yukon River that runs from British Columbia through the Yukon and into Alaska.
Most years, Southern California on the US west coast is the site of a special marine life aggregation, treating locals to one of the most unique dives in the world. Hundreds of thousands of market squid (Doryteuthis opalescens) swim into recreational dive depths to mate and lay an expansive canvas of egg baskets (collections of eggs) across the sandy substrate.
When it left San Francisco on March 25, 1921, Conestoga was en route to Tutuila, American Samoa via Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. When Conestoga failed to reach Hawaii by its anticipated arrival date the Navy mounted a massive air and sea search around the Hawaiian Islands, the tug's destination. Unable to locate the ship or wreckage, the Navy declared Conestoga and its crew lost on June 30, 1921, the last U.S. Navy ship to be lost in peacetime without a trace.
Are Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) meeting their ecological goals? Marine scientists from the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans (PISCO) monitoring the rocky reef and kelp forest communities in California state waters around the northern Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara finds positive results. Their study represents one of the first opportunities marine biologists have had to examine a network of MPAs, rather than a single location.
Scientists studying blue whales off California's coast discovered that blue whales modify the intensity of their efforts when hunting krill in order to conserve energy.
"We found that blue whales have a complex strategy of switching from conserving oxygen when prey quality is low, to intense foraging at the expense of oxygen when prey quality is high," said Elliott Hazen, research ecologist at the U.S. NOAA Fisheries' Southwest Fisheries Science Center and lead author of the study.
NOAA, working with private industry partners and the U.S. Navy, has confirmed the location and condition of the USS Independence (CVL-22), the lead ship of its class of light aircraft carriers that were critical during the American naval offensive in the Pacific during World War II.
Resting in 2,600 feet of water off California's Farallon Islands, the carrier is "amazingly intact," said NOAA scientists, with its hull and flight deck clearly visible, with what appears to be a plane in the carrier's hangar bay.
