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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
“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) |
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. |
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) |
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. |
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. |
(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) |
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.” |
In other ocean news |
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.” |
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. |
One more thing |
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. |
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. |
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! |
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. |
For more coastal and ocean stories, follow @rosanna.xia and @outofplainsightfilm on Instagram. |
