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| Where
did we go?
We drove to Redwood Creek Harbor in Redwood City to board the Robert E. Brownlee, the research vessel of the Marine Science Institute. |
Ashley, Aryannah and Robert sift through mud from the bottom of the bay in search of benthic life forms |
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| What
did we do? The Robert E Brownlee is a 70-foot research vessel that was specially designed to help people learn about San Francisco Bay. We used nets to catch fish and plankton and learned to use identification guides to identify them. We viewed the live plankton through a microscope. |
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Students prepare the video microscope with zooplankton |
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| One of the most exciting parts of the day was seeing and touching baby leopard sharks and sting rays that we caught in nets. We were surprised to learn that the skin on the sharks and rays was rough like sandpaper. | |||
Believe it or not, the average depth of the San Francisco Bay is only 12 feet. Captain Jackson, the skipper of the Robert E Brownlee, said that in 1850 the average depth of the Bay was 43 feet. That’s right. Over the last 150 years the bottom of the bay has risen 31 feet! Where did all this sediment come from? Most of the mud in the San Francisco Bay comes from the Sierra Nevada mountains. During the Gold Rush, mining companies destroyed many mountainsides in their quest to find gold. They used high-pressure water to blast away huge mountains. Over the years all the sediment loosened by hydraulic mining has gradually washed into the Sacramento river. This had led to the deposition of tons of sediment in the San Francisco Bay.
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