If you’ve ever visited California’s Monterey Bay and looked out over the immensity of the Pacific - well, I hear it’s lovely. But how many of its roughly 4 million visitors per year know that beyond the surf, they’re also in the presence of the second Grand Canyon of the United States? 1/
This is fascinating. The Astoria Canyon in the Pacific west of the Columbia River is wild, too. www.britannica.com/place/Astori...
I knew that! Apparently it's why Apple's "Monterey" operating system had a default wallpaper that looked like a big purple canyon
I knew this, but never made the connection between it and that wallpaper until now!
I read this as "a big purple crayon," which would also have been amazing.
Same! And I didn't realize that I'd read it wrong until I glanced down and saw your post. I was pretty puzzled there for a minute. 😂
i feel like local scuba divers are aware of it? nice thread if info about it! iirc it’s also why the ocean is so fucking cold up there
The currents in Atlantic and Pacific rotate in same direction. Gulf Stream brings warmed water (and storms) north. Water cools and returns south on the eastern side. CA, north of San Louis Obisbo, is on the eastern side of similar current. Ocean Geography UCSB 1982 or 83.
Absolutely - and also everyone working for the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute! (I relied on their website for a lot of this thread.) But I didn't know it was unusually cold! Thanks for that. Makes sense.
california waters are pretty cold esp if you are used to gulf or atlantic waters but there is a def gradient of cold to holy crap cold from south to north 😂
So true. I learned to dive in SoCal one summer when the water was unusually warm—70s, I think—and then a few years later we dived Point Lobos. Holy crap is right.
yes! i did the same damn thing 😂 dry suits are a thing. but going out from whaleys cove is beyond amazing 😍
whalers, dangit
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Birders know! It why we flock there so we can see deep water species close to shore.
I knew that...but I also lived there for 4 years in the 80's : ) Monterey Bay is truly amazing....
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I knew
“undersea rivers are slurries of silt and sand that cascade along channels on the seabed…. A new river starts on the continental shelf like an avalanche in the mountains.” (Undersea rivers have carved huge underwater canyons across the globe. The Monterey Canyon off CA is “like” the Grand Canyon)
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It's beautiful
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Me at the Grand Canyon: You made me schlep all this way to show me water damage? I can see that in my apartment in New York!
I live in the Coachella Valley. Will I have front row seats to the rim?
That's why the Monterey Bay Aquarium is there; perfect research location. My dad used to work there; amazing place.
Third generation native..we know.Thank you for sharing!
Isn't this understood to be an earlier outlet for the Central Valley, i.e. San Francisco Bay?
yes, sediment that suggests its origin is from the southern Sierra Nevada, which would be consistent with a river system draining the Central Valley. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Love this stuff. The sedimentology suggests that an earlier outlet of the Schuylkill to the Delaware in Philadelphia (where I live) Is about 10 miles upstream from the current mouth.
If so, I had no idea!
Forget where I read that.
I visited Monterey and learned about the deep canyon where the whales feed. It is/was (under Trump) a National Wildlife Refuge (something like that).
Used to live in Santa Cruz and they taught us about this very thing in Middle School
Hello! Santa Cruz native here. They still teach it from kinder -12 . The schools now work with the aquarium and get amazing behind the scenes field trips and lab experience.That is something I didn’t get to do back in the day.
Im glad to hear they still do this! I LOVED doing the summer program at the Longs Marine Lab when I was a kid. Miss living in Santa Cruz every day, but I cant afford 2000$/month just for rent
My family moved here way before me in 1955. And bought 2 homes. If it wasn’t for the house I grew up in I would not have been able to save and buy my own home. My kids are now doing the same. It’s definitely been a generational gift.
Yeaa, I grew up extremely poor, unfortunately did not have thar luxury
Oh, fantastic. I'm so glad it's taught at school, and kids have access like that. 😍 Hooray for science teaching working in all the right ways!
I’m about 150 miles to the north (SF Bay Area) and I wish we had been taught this when I was a kid.
Well it worked so well my now 25 yr old became a marine biologist and still is continuing school for a higher education in marine science and environmental sciences.
Haha. Great
I’ve had nightmares about that canyon. Mostly being on the beach and watching the tide go so far back it drains into that canyon. Then the tsunami hits.
Monterey Bay is a fascinating story all its own. I feel blessed to live near it.
When I lived in Monterey I hated how cold the water always is, and found out at the aquarium that this is why. Cool enough to be worth it!
Just giving the east coast some props here… en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_...
The Mariana trench
That one actually has a more conventional geological explanation: it's at the boundary between two tectonic plates, where one subducts (dives under) the other! The result in this case is the deepest-underwater point on the planet.
Can you ride a seahorse to the bottom?
Monterey is one of the most beautiful places there is. It was my second home growing up and I loved watching the Monterey Bay aquarium being built to growing into how fantastic it is today.
I used to live there so i do know about the canyon but i love to hear about it!
Thank you,for sharing this information and for also showing the links. This was a refreshing read that gave me a new appreciation of my home state of California.
My pleasure! Thanks for reading.
Thank you!
Booooo! Ignore everything under the water. We need to send humans to dusty lifeless space rocks and further destroy our own planet doing it!
My home, all you haters go to Florida. WE DON'T WANT YOU HERE
That’s fantastic!
Enlightening!
One of my favorite places 😚
I spent a lot of spring breaks in Monterey Bay as a kid, and I never knew this.
Fascinating (including the Artic one, as well). Thank you.
(@goldengateblond.bsky.social - not sure if you know about this already, since it's your corner of the world?)
i did not! monterey is so beautiful tho
Here's a relief map of the sea floor - with the vertical scale exaggerated for clarity. But the Monterey Canyon really is on a *massive* scale: walls 1,700 metres (~1 mile) high & by the time it reaches the Pacific’s abyssal plain, it’s run out from California's coast for over 400 kilometres. 2/
I was just out there doing a survey last week. It's an amazing place.
Thanks. You’re going to make me go down another rabbit hole. In case you don’t hear from me again…
It's not far off being as impressive as the Lomonosov Ridge (which I'm still amazed isn't better known) - bsky.app/profile/mike... But it’s right under the noses of millions of Californians & visitors, unknown to many of them, because of all that fun blue stuff that’s currently in the way. 3/
Courtesy of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Scientific American, this is what they’d see if those thousands of vertical metres of ocean hiding it from view suddenly drained away: www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgfk... But how did it get this way? 4/
In another parallel with the Grand Canyon, it seems to have been carved out by a river... And that river is *still flowing*, under thousands of meters of ocean! Welcome to the weird & wonderful world of UNDERWATER RIVERS. 5/
“Rather than flows of fresh (or at least salty) water, undersea rivers are slurries of silt and sand that cascade along channels on the seabed. Each particle tumbles through the water under its own weight. A new river starts on the continental shelf like an avalanche in the mountains..." 6/
."...picking up speed & momentum as it moves until it flows like a liquid. Once started, an undersea river can flow for weeks & even months at a time, moving the same amount of sediment in one go than all the world’s land-based rivers transport in an entire year." www.bbc.co.uk/future/artic... 7/
But it's not just Monterey. There are undersea rivers all over the world! Here's the coast of Portugal, where an undersea river flows down a narrow channel inside the five-mile-wide (8km) Nazaré canyon, running out to reach the Atlantic abyssal plain nearly 2.5 miles (4km) beneath the surface. 8/
Fantastic thread. Nazare Canyon creates what is widely considered the largest wave on earth. Current record for wave successfully surfed is 93.73 ft.
If you enjoy big-wow sciencey stuff like this, you may enjoy my science newsletter, Everything Is Amazing! everythingisamazing.substack.com It's totally free to sign up. 9/
Such a shitty place to put such amazing work. Get off the Nazi newsletter site, please!
Seriously, @mikeachim.bsky.social - they’re super shitty even if you don’t care about the Nazi thing:
And finally, thanks to everyone at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, whose terrific research I relied upon when putting this thread together: www.mbari.org/know-your-oc... (Everyone working in the Earth Sciences: you deserve better than what's happening to science funding right now.)
And if you enjoyed *that* thread, here's another mindblower of a story I covered a while back: bsky.app/profile/mike... Thanks for reading!
Is there a way to see if there's a linking point from monterrey to the Marianas trench?
Elkhorn Slough is the terrestrial expression of the uppermost part of the canyon; during previous ice ages, much more of the canyon was exposed. My understanding is that geologists theorize the canyon was carved by outflow from CA’s Central Valley in the Pleistocene, before the Golden Gate existed.
my favorite one of these definitely has to be Hudson canyon! I could read BOOKS about it, omg. Offshore topography is so interesting when you consider the pieces that weren't always below the water within the context of wider earth systems over long periods of time!
Wow, my Dad was stationed there when I was very young. Where I live in Scotland, the middle of our loch is over 80 meters deep. Gotta love the glacier action!
Running out west of Moss Point.
Learn more about here: www.mbari.org/know-your-oc...
One of my most favorite places. Sat there many times just being,but I didn't know about the canyon.
As a geologist, I know… and where John Denver met his untimely end….☹️
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Me, me. I know. My family has always loved that area. We visit at least 2-3 times every year (although this year we haven't--time for a drive over). We'll be moving that way soon....and I am soooo excited!
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Californian here whose mind has been blown with this information. Thank you for sharing this!
Yay! So glad I could pass all this along to you today. :)
Anyone who's been to the Monterey Bay Acquarium?
Such an amazing place! Luckily our son lives there, so we go often. Whale watching is amazing out of Moss Landing. (Recommend Blue Ocean Whale Watching - the naturist on board always teach people out the canyon etc)
I was paying too much attention to the fields of artichokes.
It is amazing! And the best place to observe sea life.
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And why there is such good surf at Moss Landing!
I grew up there. If the tourists visit the Aquarium, they will be told (no idea if they retain the info)
and an underwater USO base!
Monterey is definitely wonderful!!!
Monterey Bay is one of my favorite places on the planet. The whale watching there never disappoints.
last time I went, we saw literally thousands of dolphins. it was incredible
Been going to Montrey since the early 60s .. learned about the underwater canyon in the 80s from the Montrey Aquarium
Filled with so many of the strangest appearing previously unknown species nonetheless!
I think you'd like the book I'm reading now, CALIFORNIA FAULT by Thurston Clarke. Our narrator travels along the San Andreas Fault, learning about California and Californians and earthquakes.
