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AT EVERY DEP T H
\
AT EVERY DEP TH
Our Growing Knowledge of the
Changing Oceans
\
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CONTENTS
Prologue ix
2 The Reef 23
3 The Forest 53
4 The Gardens 75
Epilogue 209
Acknowledgments 215
Notes 217
Index 257
PROLOGUE
For this, we are especially grateful. In researching this book, we were entrusted
with stories and histories of connection to the coast and ocean. We do the best
we can to introduce you to these storytellers. We acknowledge that, in many
cases, these stories are told by Indigenous knowledge holders, and in those cases,
we are particularly careful to make sure the stories that are told here are told in
the way that they wished.
In each of these discussions, we would start by introducing what we are trying
to do with this book. The ocean is changing so fast, but people describe it as vast,
open, blue, untouched, and untouchable. Can you tell us how you are touched by the
ocean? The ocean is the main character in this story, we would say, but it needs a
voice. Can you tell us what you see changing? There is bravery in being a witness to
change. At its very heart, these are stories about the observers of the ocean, the
people who know it best, and they want you to know what they see.
This book is organized by places; as such, it is a meander through ocean envi-
ronments. But it is not meant to be comprehensive or textbook-like in its cover-
age. These places and stories are representative, not exhaustive. The challenges
faced by people studying, learning, living, and loving these places—and the hope
they carry for the future—are meant to be a starting point for exploring the
changing ocean.
AT EVERY DEP T H
\
CHAPTER 1
Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know
the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the seaweed
of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where shoals
of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to
breathe the upper atmosphere.
—Rachel Carson, Undersea
W e often hear how little people know about the ocean. The chal-
lenge with the ocean, of course, is that it is hard to wrap your
arms around it: the expanse, the depth, the eternal blueness. Yet
we should also not pretend that we don’t know anything at all. What we know is,
in fact, remarkable. The human exploration of the ocean over millennia, in every
place where we could touch, observe, listen, poke, and prod, has led us to a con-
siderable understanding of its nature. Now we face a new difficulty, one greater
than even the physical or scale limitations we’ve come up against so many times
before: the ocean is changing so fast. How do you understand change affecting
two-thirds of the surface of our planet? How can we tell a story about the ocean
and people and our collective future while simply sitting on the shore?
You can start, as our story will show, with a tide pool. The tide pool is an
entire universe, rocks and sun and water, forests and shrubs and meadows, graz-
ers and roamers and apex predators, all fully contained in a few feet of rock and
reset with each change in tide. It captures, too, the ocean’s extremes. It warms in
the sun then chills rapidly once the ocean water returns. As animals breathe out
carbon dioxide in an isolated pool, the chemistry changes dramatically, a preview
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2 THE TIDE POOL
nature. The human ability to read nearshore change goes as far back, some scien-
tists think, as the modern human mind.4 Early in our history, as people were first
starting to spread across Africa, the climate changed, and vast deserts formed in
the interior.5 Some early humans decamped to the rocky shoreline. At one cave
site at Pinnacle Point in South Africa, paleoanthropologists have found shells,
food, and tools dating to 164,000 years ago.6 Based on calculations of past sea lev-
els, the caves would have been a few miles inland at the time. To survive there and
then, our species would have had to know or learn about tides and how to make
a priority of a trip to the ocean. “I surmise that the people who lived at [Pinnacle
Point] . . . scheduled their trips to the shore using a lunar calendar of sorts, just
as modern coastal people have done for ages,” the archaeologist Curtis Marean
wrote in Scientific American in 2010. Although the field of human origins has
many competing theories, Marean says that he believes the evidence from those
caves showed that in a time of climate change and mortal peril for our species,
the tide pools—the ocean—“saved humanity.”7
Now, as the ocean changes more rapidly than it has in human history, the
understanding of the tide pool we have built over millennia will matter. To mea-
sure change, you have to have a baseline to measure it against. Tide pools, one
of the oceanic habitats we know best, may be one of the most valuable baselines
that we have to understand the past and present global ocean.8
w
One of the world’s most studied shorelines stretches 3,000 miles down the
western edge of North America, from Alaska to Baja California. Winds swirling
in the Gulf of Alaska cascade down the coast, stirring up the ocean and upwelling
cold, nutrient-rich water that sloshes against the rocky edge of the continent.
In many places along the rocky shoreline of the West Coast, there might be
hundreds of visible species and thousands of individual animals in a few square
yards. To take one particularly meaningful example: in the mid-1990s a small
team of ecologists surveyed a narrow, 108-yard-long, one-yard-wide stretch in a
tide pool area in central California. After two years of visits, they had counted
125,590 individual animals on the rocks, representing 135 different species. Even
that was a limited total. The scientists admit they chose to ignore one species of
clam, three abundant species of small snail, and all the various colony-forming
tunicates and sponges, which were simply too difficult to count.9
4 THE TIDE POOL
This closely investigated tide pool in Pacific Grove, California, formed where
a crown of granite pushes out northeast into Monterey Bay. The rock slabs lean
at angles against one another like a giant tumbled set of children’s blocks. In the
deep fissures, cracks, and channels between the rocks, the blue water sloshes
through. The incredible biodiversity in the tide pools feeds a host of larger ani-
mals that move through. Otters splash into the shallows; egrets and herons stand
still in the water; gulls and oystercatchers perch on the mounds of seaweed that
pile on the lower rocks. On the smooth, rounded tops of the higher rocks, cormo-
rants spread their wings like decorative gargoyles overlooking a castle. The cor-
morants preside over a piece of shoreline with a variety of names today. Where
the rock pushes out farthest into the bay, it forms Point Cabrillo, named for
the European navigator who visited the California coast in 1542. The rocks and
pools sit just inside the southern boundary of the Lovers Point–Julia Platt State
Marine Reserve and just north of the Edward Ricketts State Marine Conser-
vation Area. Directly above them, in a series of low, barracks-style buildings is
Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station.
People lived around and visited these tide pools for millennia before the
arrival of Europeans. Today the Indigenous people of Monterey Bay go by a vari-
ety of names, including Rumsen, Rumsien, Ohlone, Costanoan, and Esselen. All
but the Esselen once spoke Rumsen, a language based in a family shared with
people to the north in the San Francisco Bay Area. Historians and linguists call
these the Ohlone languages, and—although the people at the time likely would
not have seen themselves as organized by their primary language—tend to sepa-
rate groups today by the primary Ohlone dialect they spoke.10 The Spanish called
them all costeños, coast people.
w
On New Year’s Day, 1603, it snowed in Monterey. The nearby Santa Lucia Moun-
tains turned white. It reminded the Spanish navigator Sebastián Vizcaíno, who
had anchored just off Point Cabrillo, of the Popocatepetl volcano in central Mex-
ico, where his voyage had started.11 Water left out overnight froze on the Spanish
ships, and a crust of ice several inches thick formed on freshwater ponds. A small
group of Spanish set off to explore the land around Monterey, hiking through the
bitter cold as far as Carmel. They reported empty villages; everyone had moved
inland to wait out the weather. Two days later, the Spanish were gone, sailing
THE TIDE POOL 5
north up the California coast for Cape Mendocino, skirting the entrance to the
San Francisco Bay that they did not yet know existed. It would be more than 150
years before they returned, this time to stay. In 1769, Spanish soldiers marched
north from San Diego to look for the Monterey harbor Vizcaíno described. They
had been sent to look for a place to establish an outpost against the English and
the Russians, and Monterey seemed promising. By 1772, the Spanish had built a
base in Monterey and a mission in nearby Carmel. The Spanish compelled the
Indigenous people they found to relocate into the missions, centralizing people
who had once spread out across the land according to the seasons. Spanish set-
tlers banned the practice of burning oak woodlands, which had encouraged tree
and grassland growth, and carved the land into ranches, introducing cattle herds
and invasive pasture grasses.12 In the summer and fall today, two centuries later,
the hills of the Golden State turn gold from the sun shining on Spanish oats,
fescue, and barley. For coastal Indigenous people, this part of history marked
the beginning of a centuries-long resistance to colonial oppression and rule, and
fighting to maintain their connection to the land and sea that had been honed
over thousands of years. Even beyond the Mission era, “Native people creatively
reaffirmed their connections to place and cultivated a sense of belonging within
homelands increasingly becoming home to others,” the Coast Miwok and Uni-
versity of California, Santa Cruz, archaeologist Tsim Schneider writes.13
Change in the ocean is not always so evident as change on land. The invasive
weeds growing along the roadside are there for anyone to see, but only those
with experienced eyes see the algae expanding in a tide pool or once-common
shells becoming rare. Change, however, happens whether most people see it or
not. Beneath its eternally blue surface, in the pools around its timeless granite,
the ocean where Vizcaíno anchored in 1603 must have been shockingly different
from the one you would see out the window looking at Monterey Bay today. And
because people don’t live in the water, it has been one of the great challenges in
culture and in science for the witnesses who do see the ocean changing to con-
vince the world of what they know.
w
In 1931, a young man named Willis G. Hewatt arrived in Monterey. Hewatt had
just received a master’s degree in biology from Texas Christian University in
Fort Worth, Texas, and married his wife, Elizabeth. The day after the wedding,
6 THE TIDE POOL
the couple drove west. Hewatt had decided to continue his academic work and
pursue a PhD in the tide pools of Pacific Grove, California.14
He arrived in a town booming with cash, culture, and science. Monterey in
the 1930s was home to a literary community headlined by John Steinbeck. When
he wasn’t writing, Steinbeck explored his love of marine biology in field classes
in the tide pool behind the new Stanford University Hopkins Marine Station.
The marine station, built on top of a fishing village after the eviction of the
Chinese immigrants who had made a home there, had rapidly established itself
as one of the nation’s premier marine biological laboratories, a West Coast rival
to the famed East Coast labs at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, and
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Massachusetts. On the Monterey water-
front, fishers, boat operators, and factory workers thrived in the seemingly inex-
haustible sardine fishery that gave name to Steinbeck’s 1945 novel, Cannery Row.
Just south of Hopkins, near where the Monterey Bay Aquarium was built a
half century later, a marine collector named Edward Ricketts operated a mail-or-
der biology supply store called Pacific Biological Laboratories. Ricketts was
working on a manuscript for a book called Between Pacific Tides, a first-of-its-
kind guidebook to the tide pool that focused on life from shallow to deep, as a
collector might find it, instead of arranged taxonomically. The manuscript was
at first rejected; the director of the marine station at that time wrote that “the
method of taking up the animals from the standpoint of station and exposure on
the seashore seems at first sight very logical but from the practical standpoint it
seems to me not particularly happy.”15
But Hewatt, who read Ricketts’s first draft in the Hopkins library, found the
idea of a tide pool organized by zones intriguing. Hewatt decided he wanted
to study the arrangement of animals in a tide pool for his dissertation. In 1931,
he drove a series of four iron bolts into the Pacific Grove granite. For the next
three years, he went out at low tide and counted and categorized all the tide pool
inhabitants in one square yard around his bolts. The study site, stretching from
a nearshore boulder below the marine station to a large mussel bed 324 feet out
into the tide pools, became known as Hewatt’s transect. Yet its creator couldn’t
imagine the significance his site would one day hold. Upon the conclusion of his
work in 1935, he filed his dissertation with his committee, received approval of
his work, and moved back home to Texas to become a professor of biology at
Texas Christian University. Mats of purple and brown seaweed soon grew thick
over the transect bolts. People knew Hewatt had been there but couldn’t say
THE TIDE POOL 7
exactly where. His dissertation was published in the American Midland Naturalist
in 1937, and perhaps only few noticed.16 After all, how could it matter?
w
On a clear winter day in 2019, the ecologist Jim Barry walked us from the Hop-
kins Marine Station along a dusty path to the edge of the bluff, past a pair of sea
otter researchers standing over a spotting scope, and toward the tide pools. It’s a
scramble down a head-high drop from the bluffs to the beach, onto a thick layer
of broken mussel shells that crunch near the water’s edge. The rocks here date to
around 80 million years ago, little broken-off pieces of volcanic deposits, bumping
northwest over the eons in the fault zone between the Pacific and North Ameri-
can geologic plates. Worn and eroded, they nonetheless feel as eternal as the blue
ocean around them. When he was a graduate student in San Diego, Barry would
try to work in the crumbling and constantly shifting sandstone of the tide pools of
La Jolla. “Granite,” he said, appreciatively, noting the contrast. “It’s here forever.”
When Barry started his marine biology career in 1991 as a young scientist
at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, his office was right up the
street from Hopkins, and he’d often come down to the lab to talk to the sta-
tion’s resident elder, Chuck Baxter, who’d been lecturing to Stanford Univer-
sity undergraduates since the 1970s. Barry was a scientist and a surfer who had
been hooked by the ocean early as a kid growing up in Northern California. He
had spent summers in the Antarctic as a research assistant and earned a PhD
in oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.
Baxter was a thinker and philosopher who knew the history of the place and
everyone who’d come through it like he knew his own family. He’d worked up
and down the West Coast, read deeply of Pacific history, and been one of the
founding scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Once, Baxter mentioned to
Barry that he felt like things had changed in the tide pools out the window. He
looked out at the water pouring through the rocks, and he felt something about
it looked like Southern California. They got to talking. Baxter had been thinking
already about the Hewatt transect, and now he wanted to return to it. According
to the predictions of the still-new science of global warming, you would expect
marine creatures to move north toward colder water at the pole. Maybe Baxter’s
gut feeling that he saw Southern California out the window had a basis, one that
Hewatt’s historic descriptions of the tide pool might allow observers to unveil.
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