California Coast & Ocean

I love to fly. This may seem like an odd sentiment in the age of cramped seats, cattle-call boarding processes, no food, and irksome delays. Yet there is something about the surge of acceleration that pushes you back in your seat as the jet hurtles down the runway that I just love every time. And of course, I usually try to get a window seat, the better to watch the landscape unfold below.

From the air, all kinds of patterns emerge, patterns you are barely aware of when you’re on the ground. On a flight from the Bay Area to Chicago, for instance, the entire Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is often visible, and the contrast between the meandering natural channels and the straight lines of the engineered canals and levees is striking. Climbing over the Sierra, you get an instant picture of the quality of the snowpack (bad this year). By looking closely, I’ve often been able to recognize places that I’ve hiked in.

Aerial views have played a key role in conservation for quite some time. As detailed in this issue of Coast & Ocean, LightHawk has been taking decision-makers aloft for 28 years to show them what is at stake. More recently, our work at the Coastal Conservancy--and pretty much any organization involved in coastal protection--has been enhanced by the periodic photographic flights taken by Ken and Gabrielle Adelman (see www.californiacoastline.org). Our coast is not only under constant economic pressure, it is one of the most geologically active coastlines in the world, so a routine photographic record is invaluable.

Most of the time we don’t get to fly over our work, so we have to make do with maps. A map is a proxy for an aerial view, but it can also show you things you don’t see from the air, such as property lines or pipelines, for instance. Having a good map is the difference between the known and the unknown, the seen and the still hidden. The first step toward lunar exploration was a good map, and it is no surprise that some of the oldest parts of the federal government are those concerned historically--and to this day--with map-making (see John Cloud’s article in our previous issue at www.coastandocean.org).

Most maps stop at the water’s edge, leaving to the user’s imagination the task of filling in the blue spaces that cover most of our planet. The Pacific Basin is usually cut in half, which is unfortunate at a time when we are more and more connected economically with Asia, and our ecological interdependence is ever more obvious.

The new generation of mapping and display technologies, however, especially those applied under water, is literally opening up whole new vistas for science and exploration. Ocean-floor mappers have found long-lost shipwrecks, earthquake faults, vast systems of sand dunes, and all kinds of other previously unrecognized sea-floor features. We can’t conserve what we don’t know we have, so maps are essential for designing marine reserves and for making other informed management decisions.

These maps are also a lot of fun. Once the numbers are crunched and appropriate software is loaded, we can simulate “flying” over the ocean bottom, in and out of canyons and over rocky reefs, on our computer screens. The Scripps Institute of Oceanography has a Visualization Laboratory where map data can be displayed on screens that wrap around almost 180 degrees. Viewing underwater maps there felt to me like flying around San Diego Bay in a submersible.

Here, thanks to the Ocean Protection Council, we have embarked on a historic effort to map in high resolution the entire ocean floor within three miles of our coastline. This has already led to some astonishing discoveries. We now understand why Maverick’s is such a perfect wave machine, and have a better idea of locations where underwater landslides could create tsunami hazards.

Looking down on the planet’s surface from my seat in an airliner, I have often wished that some of the new mapping technology would be applied to enable
passengers to learn more about geography. Wouldn’t it be marvelous if we could push a button and see on the little screen at the back of each seat a map that identifies what we are flying over? As with LightHawk, the conservation payoff could be well worth the investment.