This week we head up the road to appreciate the California coastline and the Pacific Ocean. People don’t always think of winter as prime time for a coast visit, but in many ways it’s just perfect—especially if you appreciate surly surf and a big, lonely landscape. Exploring the coast in winter is also perfect for avoiding the crowds.
The California coastline extends some 1200 miles, from the border of Mexico, to Oregon, connecting many worlds and unique landscapes and ecosystems along the way. The universal part of the experience is the grand Pacific Ocean itself, which most of us think of as striking scenery, backdrop for those famous California sunsets.
But it’s much, much more than a pretty picture. It’s a world in itself, the largest and deepest ocean, almost 64 million square miles in surface area, which is a third of the world’s entire surface, almost half of its water surface, and just over half the world’s ocean water volume. We look out at the ocean from the West Coast of the U.S. But from a global perspective, our coast helps define the ocean’s eastern reaches. That the Pacific Ocean connects so many landforms and nations helps explain its major role in worldwide migration and immigration over the eons.
The picture-pretty human view of the Pacific Ocean hides its immense depths, an average depth of about 14,000 feet, a maximum depth of almost 36,000 feet. The surface view also hides its most fascinating features, including underwater or submarine volcanoes and shy, mysterious, often weird-looking creatures that dwell only in the deep.
The water of the Pacific Ocean is also an immense mystery, as researchers continue to discover. According to research published this month by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Harvard University, our ocean’s deepest waters also have a very, very long memory:
“When the water in today's deep Pacific Ocean last saw sunlight, Charlemagne was the Holy Roman Emperor, the Song Dynasty ruled China, and Oxford University had just held its very first class. During that time, between the 9th and 12th centuries, the earth's climate was generally warmer before the cold of the Little Ice Age settled in around the 16th century. Now ocean surface temperatures are back on the rise but the question is, do the deepest parts of the ocean know that?”
The answer, based on ocean warming models and scientific data collected by an 1857 three-masted wooden sailing ship and the 1990s World Ocean Circulation Experiment, is:
There can be a lag of hundreds and hundreds of years between ocean surface temperatures and the denser, heavier, cooler water far below. In other words, while the surface of the ocean is now warming—rapidly—as a result of climate change, its depths may be getting colder, still reflecting cooling climate trends underway a millennium ago.
Which also means estimates of how much heat the Earth and its oceans absorbed during the 20th century need to be revised downward by about 30 percent, researchers say.
Now, that is something to contemplate while walking the California coastline and looking out at that lovely ocean.
