Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
imagined what different versions of the past and its communities may have
looked like. I saw each dive as a key to unlock the past.
In February I accompanied a group of new divers on a particularly cold
day. We were working off the west coast of San Juan Island, in some of the
most beautiful waters in all of the Americas. The huge inland sea called
Puget Sound, connected to the Straits of George in Canada, is one of the
most diverse (and coldest) underwater regions on earth—diverse in terms of
both the animals and plants present and the various types of terrain that can
be encountered.
We waded in from the beach. The dive was to be into rocky scallop
beds at 50 feet or more. We shivered at water's edge, eager to get in, for this
was one of the rare days when the water was warmer than the air around us.
We looked like a flock of lugubrious penguins, shiny in our dark neoprene
wetsuits, shuffling awkwardly in the massive equipment. When all was ready
and I had absorbed the first shock of the frigid water against my skin, I re-
placed snorkel with regulator mouthpiece, drew a first metallic taste of com-
pressed air, and headed down.
We passed first over gravel, then over bedrock showing the distinctive
intertidal zonations of this region (barnacles followed by a mussel zone), and
finally into the subtidal, where a far greater diversity of marine life greeted
us. We continued downward, moving over the festooned rocky bottom, pass-
ing through pennants of green and red kelp while armies of sea urchins
waved their spiny pikes at our passing shockwaves. At last we entered the
zone rich in scallops, first encountered about 30 feet down, our fins creating
turbulence that sent these bizarre mollusks swimming like so many wildly
clacking false teeth in a bad cartoon. The water became clearer and colder,
but calmer as well, the world of air and surface and all manner of that life
edging away, and I felt exhilarated. I watched, and studied, and noted the re-
lationship between depth and the type of animals present, not knowing at
the time that I was laying the foundation for understanding one of the most
important of all paleontological principles: that water depth can be inferred
from the type of fossils present in a sedimentary section. Using the present to
