SAN DIEGO — For ocean-lovers, going underwater might be very appealing. But we can’t always jump in, so when we’re stuck on land, there’s a new tool that can take us into the underwater world.
At La Jolla Shores, your eye is not only drawn to the waves but probably to the Scripps pier that jets out over the Pacific Ocean. While everything above water can be captivating, what’s going on underwater is just as important and beautiful.
And now, anyone with the internet can get a glimpse, thanks to the livestream of a hi-definition camera set up on one of the pilings of the pier.
“Some resident lobsters are hanging out on the right side which is fun to see and we have a resident octopus come out now and then,” said Melissa Carter, the manager of the Shore Stations Program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Carter has been collecting data from the ocean for about 25 years and a few weeks ago, she helped make a new camera happen. She placed it about 12 to 15 feet deep, depending on the tide, on the south side of the pier, facing the shore. So on a very clear day, you might see 3 to 4 pilings, and that would indicate about 15 feet of visibility. “The number of pilings you see tells you how far of the visibility is that you’ll actually see… we wanted to give divers a look under the ocean to determine whether or not it was a good time to dive,” said Carter.
And after only a couple weeks of going live, it has already captured some incredible and rare species, “At least my favorite that we’ve seen so far is a giant sea bass it looks like it swam up to say ‘hi'", Carter said. "We’ve also seen leopard sharks we’ve seen birds swimming down to get fish.”
You might also catch Carter herself, or other members of her team as they SCUBA and free dive to keep the camera clean.
Yes, it can be a lot of fun to watch - maybe even a slight distraction from day-to-day - but there’s a serious side to this.
“I run the longest continuous temperature and salinity timed series in the Pacific Ocean,” explained Carter.
Every day someone manually takes a sample of the water off the Scripps Pier and checks its temperature and salinity. That process has been going on since 1916. The hope now is with this new camera in place there’s another way to keep eyes on the ocean.
Like many of the tools and technology on the Pier, Carter is requesting grant funding to keep a record of what this camera discovers.
“Us trying to better understand the role nutrients and warming all play into our water quality and our ocean's health,” she said.
And why are some days murkier than others? “When these algal blooms occur, you can see the water go from very clear, sometimes it’s like a wave of bad visibility. So dark red or green water creeps in on you, like the fog,” she explains.
The camera was donated by a Scripps graduate. The owner of Deep Sea Power and Light equips things like robots with cameras that can capture deep ocean images. And now 40 years after graduating, his work is something we can all learn from hopefully for generations to come.
Here's the link to view the camera: https://coollab.ucsd.edu/pierviz/
WATCH: Scripps Pier Dedication Ceremony in 1974