More pictures of Cargill as part of San Francisco Bay

Arizona developers are denying that Cargill ponds are part of San Francisco Bay.  Below is more evidence to the contrary.

-Brian

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Tackling the rise in SF Bay levels

Climate change-induced sea level rise will have a similar effect on San Francisco Bay, leaving planners, taxpayers, and environmentalists with a difficult problem in how to manage the rising Bay. The Chronicle covers some interesting and highly speculative ideas entered in a recent contest:

Once they would have been the stuff of science fiction: shimmering levees of
water that shield cities, or laser beams slicing across water through the
night.

In fact, these are two of six winners announced Tuesday in a
design competition that responds to a real-life threat - scientific projections
that in the century to come, the sea level of San Francisco Bay could climb 55
inches beyond today's high tide.
"We need to rethink how we build along the
shoreline, but we didn't have the answers," said Will Travis, executive director
of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, which
organized the competition. "So we decided to cast the net for ideas."

The ideas can be seen here. I skimmed through a few, and any solution is going to be expensive. This is something that both San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties are going to have to deal with, soon.

It would be interesting to see how much could be saved if aggressive action on climate cut the Bay level increase in half.

-Brian

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The great San Francisco Bay snail migration (with some exaggeration)

One nice aspect of our office on Bayshore Road is it's sufficiently close to the Baylands that I can get out on occasional walks. One day recently I had a burrito lunch walk, ending up on a wooden platform extending a little ways over the water at high tide. Everywhere under the shallow surface were snails, slowly moving about.

Seeing snails was nothing new, but this time I stayed in one place long enough to see something different. The seemingly-random, slow snail movement was actually converging on a submerged tidal channel, where a higher concentration of snails were already moving downstream - thousands of snails as far as I could see, in some kind of migration.

I don't really know what was going on. It was shortly after high tide, so the snails may have just been moving to keep below water level. Or maybe it was a real seasonal migration of some type. Still, I felt lucky to have this mini-revelation of a natural process going on in a place I had been to dozens of times before.

Another reason to keep in mind the value of easily-visited, local open space, giving us a chance for revelations that we don't see in our first visit.

-Brian

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