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This
might come as a surprise, unless you’re
plugged into ocean science lore: The
oldest and longest-running marine
ecosystem monitoring program in the
world is based right off the coast of
Southern California.
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Every
season, for more than three-quarters of
a century, researchers with the California
Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries
Investigations — or CalCOFI, for
those in the know — have sailed hundreds
of miles off the Golden State’s coast
and collected a dizzying array of
zooplankton, microscopic plant matter,
larvae and all manner of fish. Like
taking a pulse of the ocean at
particular moments in time, generations
of scientists have meticulously
documented water temperature, salinity,
acidity, oxygen levels and dozens of
other data points that have become the
gold standard for understanding the
ocean and how it’s changing.
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Nowhere
else on the planet has such a large
swath of ocean been studied as
thoroughly and for so long, and much of
our modern approach to oceanography and
weather forecasts can be traced back to
this hidden gem in marine science. In
fact, it’s thanks to CalCOFI that in
1958, scientists first pieced together
that El Niño (a term being used locally
in Peru at the time) was a climate
phenomenon that wreaked havoc not just
in Latin America — but also in
California, and in turn, the world.
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And
now in a world facing sea level rise,
ocean acidification, record-breaking marine heat
waves and a looming “super” El Niño
— being able to reexamine past
fluctuations in the ocean and what used
to be “normal” is critical to preparing
for the future.
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Have
a question on what happened to fish
during the last marine heat wave? Ask
CalCOFI. Need a snapshot of the ocean
before an oil spill? Check CalCOFI. And
when The Times breaks news that, say, a shocking
amount of DDT had been dumped off
the coast of Southern California in the
1950s, scientists can go back in time
and comb through millions of archived
fish samples to track a
chemical that they didn’t know to
look for until now.
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This
research collaborative can even jump in
as disasters are unfolding. When Los
Angeles erupted in
flames last year and ash started
to rain upon the sea, scientists
happened to already be out on the water.
They promptly gathered soot-tainted
samples and confirmed that debris from
the Palisades and Eaton fires had
clouded the ocean’s surface as far as 100
miles offshore.
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All
told, more than 10,450 peer-reviewed
scientific papers have cited or
mentioned CalCOFI data since the
monitoring program began. In just the
past year, 553 published papers have
relied on CalCOFI data in some form.
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“I’ve
been using information from CalCOFI for
as long as I can remember, being in this
field since my Heal the Bay days — it is
just that fundamental to really
understanding what’s going on in the
ocean,” said Mark Gold, a longtime
environmental champion who was recently
appointed CalCOFI’s new director for
the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
at UC San Diego. “The fact that you have
this treasure trove of samples going
back 77 years that you can continue to
ask questions to … there’s just nothing
else like it on Earth.”
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The R/V Crest, pictured here in 1949,
was one of the first research vessels
used to conduct CalCOFI research
cruises. (Courtesy of Scripps
Institution of Oceanography)
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The
first CalCOFI expedition set sail in
1949 in a joint effort by Scripps, the
National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA
Fisheries) and state fish and wildlife
officials. The original quest was to
study the collapse of California’s
sardine industry, but scientists quickly
realized that solving that mystery
required studying not just one species,
but also all the interconnected
components across the ecosystem.
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So
CalCOFI started to collect detailed
samples of the ocean from 75 to 113
stations, returning to the same spots
each season along a carefully mapped-out
grid that zigzags from the Mexico
border, up past San Francisco and out to
300 miles offshore. Researchers on board
work around the clock collecting fish,
pulling in plankton nets, taking
acoustic measurements and documenting
every whale and seabird they see. The
ship itself is a floating lab, with
scientists identifying tiny organisms
under microscopes, analyzing water
chemistry and testing new research
techniques such as
environmental DNA.
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“There
are all these people who are
discovering, defining, cataloging and
maintaining these individual threads
that weave into this beautiful fabric
that is our world — and helping us
understand what happens if one of those
threads is pulled,” said Noelle Bowlin,
director of CalCOFI for NOAA Fisheries.
“Many parts of our future are dependent
on scientists doing this work — much of
it behind-the-scenes work that nobody
really knows about.”
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Noelle Bowlin, director of CalCOFI for
NOAA Fisheries, takes a selfie aboard
the research vessel Sally Ride just
after preserving a surface ocean sample
collected with a manta net. (Noelle
Bowlin/NOAA Fisheries)
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Keeping
such a living collection alive is no
small feat. Walking today through
CalCOFI’s archives in San Diego is like
being at a national library, but with
shelves and shelves of vials and jars
instead of books, and seemingly endless
banks of freezers at minus 80 degrees
Celsius. These snapshots of every layer
of the ocean are invaluable, and
multiple scientists are always on call
after midnight in case a freezer goes
down.
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CalCOFI
is a humbling reminder that it can take
decades of commitment to understand even
one patch of ocean. And at a time when
federal budget slashes have upended many
institutions of science and newer
programs have struggled to stay afloat,
continuing any baseline of knowledge
that we do have is even more critical.
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(Just
last week, news broke
that the Trump administration is
dismantling the Ocean
Observatories Initiative, which
had installed a network of deep-sea
monitors just 10 years ago off the coast
of Alaska, Oregon, Washington State,
North Carolina and a key area between
Greenland and Iceland known as the
Irminger Sea.)
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Since 1949, scientists at Scripps, NOAA
and California Fish and Wildlife have
systematically collected samples from
more than 100 stations off the
California coast. (CalCOFI)
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Gold,
who has navigated the booms and busts of
seven presidential administrations, said
a lot is at stake but CalCOFI proves how
much this research is needed — and how it needs to
grow. He points to the many
monitoring efforts that have been
inspired by CalCOFI over the years —
programs on the East
Coast and as far as New Zealand,
Spain and Peru.
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“There
is a tremendous need to improve and
expand ocean monitoring,” Gold said.
“This information is used in so many
different ways, and we’ve seen how
instrumental CalCOFI has been to
understanding climate, ocean health,
fisheries, risks of eating contaminated
seafood, swimming in pathogen-polluted
waters, you name it ... It has just been
invaluable.”
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In
other ocean news
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The
United Nations just released a new
assessment on ocean health — and
it is sobering. The report documents a
“deepening crisis” as climate change,
pollution, overfishing and biodiversity
loss threaten marine ecosystems critical
to human survival, as Todd Woody reports for
Bloomberg. Here’s one of many data
points to consider: “About 38% of global
fish stocks in 2021 were being harvested
faster than populations could replenish
themselves.”
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And
here in California, the iconic pier in
Pacifica was shut down last week after
cracks were discovered and concrete
chunks were falling into the ocean. It’s
just one of many structures along our
coast that have recently crumbled under
pressure from a rising and increasingly
stormy sea, as reported in
The Times by my colleague Susanne
Rust.
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One
more thing
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The
San Diego Natural History Museum will be
doing a special
screening next Tuesday, June 16,
of “Out of Plain
Sight,” the documentary I directed
with Daniel Straub. The film is a
cinematic expansion of my reporting on the legacy of
DDT and toxic waste dumping off
the coast of Southern California. We’ve
been taking the film through the film
festival circuit, and I’m grateful to
share that we’ve received some of the
highest honors in environmental
filmmaking, including the Jackson Wild
Media Award for best
investigative film.
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The
San Diego screening starts at 7 p.m. and
I will be there to moderate a Q&A
featuring David Valentine from UC Santa
Barbara, Lihini Aluwihare from Scripps,
Eunha Hoh from San Diego State
University’s School of Public Health and
Alissa Deming from the Pacific Marine
Mammal Center.
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For
those based on the East Coast, we will
also be doing a special
screening and Q&A with Fara
Warner at the University of Rhode Island
as part of the Metcalf Institute’s
distinguished Leeson Lecture series. The
screening starts at 3 p.m. on Tuesday,
June 23 and is open to the public. Come
say hello!
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This
is the latest edition of Boiling
Point, a newsletter about climate
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more coastal and ocean stories, follow
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