Voyages John Orcutt

In this long-delayed conclusion of Voyages' hourney down the California Current, we visit Santa Barbara, Morro Bay, and the Big Sur to explore the many ways in which the seas here have impacted our species - and how, in the last century and a half, we've impacted them in return.

In the third leg of our journey along the California Coast, we visit Monterey Bay. An undersea canyon, sunlit shallows, and nutrients dredged up from the depths by the California Current make the bay a great place to wrap your head around the complex interactions between organisms and their environment that shape ecosystems and give these waters their staggering diversity of life. We'll explore those interactions this episode, meet the pioneering ecologist who was among the first to study them, and travel to the monumental aquarium that was built to celebrate both.

In the second part of Voyages' journey along the California Current, we explore the Golden State's North Coast, where the line between land and sea is a very blurry one. You can see that blurriness amidst the gargantuan forests of the Redwood Coast, which wouldn't exist if not for ties for the cold Pacific Ocean. You can see it even more clearly in the intertidal zone, where sea becomes land twice a day, and there are few finer places to experience this transition zone than the dramatic Mendocino and Sonoma County shores.

In this first of a multi-episode series exporing the California Current and the diverse ecosystems and cultures it supports, we're heading to San Francisco to explore how Earth systems - the huge forces that shape the face of our planet - converge on this most beautiful of cities and what this can tell us about how they operate.

In the long-delayed Season 2 finale, we're traveling to the Bay Area to explore islands. In human history, the remoteness of islands has long been attractive to those interested in imprisoning others, as the dark pasts of Alactraz and Angel Island so effectively demonstrate. But the very fact that islands are cut off from the rest of the world means that evolution often follows unique paths on them, making them crucibles of biodiversity. From endemic moles to unwilling poets, we'll delve into the way islands shape and are shaped by the species that occupy them.

In this delayed episode (sorry; neither scheduling nor technology were playing well with me this week) I'm joined by fellow GU faculty member Emily Loeffler to talk about Switzerland, Victorian tourists in the Alps, and the incredibly diverse music that was performed for them.