A few distinct, but unrelated experiences have brought the issue of plastic balloons in the ocean into frequent conversation this week. It began with last Saturday’s annual California Coastal Cleanup Day. I happened to be out on Santa Cruz Island with my son’s Boy Scout Troop. Our 30 scouts made quick work of the debris… Read more »
Yet another start of the summer and yet another pipeline break on the south coast.
A few weeks ago saw me up in Simi Valley speaking to folks from young to old about what began last May 19 at Refugio Beach. I always enjoy giving one of our monthly installment of the CSU Channel Islands Library Lecture Series, an array of public lectures held across Ventura County open to all comers. This presentation had… Read more »
Last weekend our sandy beach troupe made the long (6.5 hour) drive up to Sacramento for the 96th annual meeting of the Western Society of Naturalists. This is a core meeting for our research group and one of the few meetings we attend every year, rain or shine. This year’s meeting saw several of our students and professors presenting… Read more »
After several hours of detailed field assessments across Summerland beaches and associated explorations of neighboring beaches bracketing the Summerland area yesterday, we now have a much clearer and complete picture of the current beach oiling event occurring in Summerland at the moment. Below I summarize the state of affairs as of Sunday, August 23, 2015. … Read more »
More to come shortly, but the oiling here appears to clearly be a case of heavier than normal seep activity. The issue seems to have been driven by some local topography concentrating the oil into some rather defined pools/swales. Several of these happen to be right at the foot of the main public ramp/entrance to… Read more »
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. — Albert Einstein We have been fortunate to have been running a Summer Institute for undergraduates from CSU Channel Islands and our regional Community Colleges since 2009. Every June we pull in students from these campuses and embed them… Read more »
Our colleagues at Santa Barbara Channelkeeper just ran another subtidal inspection on Naples Reef (a few minutes south of the Refugio spill epicenter) and happily again found no obvious sign of major oiling in the area. This combined with our previous surveys in this same area a few weeks back and California Reef Check‘s… Read more »
Our on-going public opinion polling of beach goers in the wake of the Refugio Oil Spill is beginning to show some interesting patterns. We are still in the midst of collecting data (check back in a week or two when we have had a chance to fully explore this data coming in daily), but a… Read more »
Note: this is a field posting from a Mobil device, please excuse errors. This post will be cleaned up this evening. We have been getting to our more routine survey sites in Los Angeles County over the past few days. We have seen no evidence of more recent tarring. Generally the beaches in LA… Read more »
