Super blooms and spring break
Good morning,
Or whatever the time happens to be when you are reading this.
When I am writing this it is morning at least. Early morning. It’s just before 5 am an I’m sitting in a corner of San Diego airport. It’s empty here, just me and someone in a janitor uniform who’s scrubbing the armrest between the chairs with a toothbrush. It looks difficult.
I am thinking about whether or not I managed to forget something important. I hope not. The past week has need busy, finals week you know, but now I finally have spring break and in about an hour I’m on a plane to Canada. I’ll be spending a couple of days in Vancouver and a few days in Whistler before I return back to San Diego. I promise to write a few lines and show some photos in a couple of days, but for now, here is a little recap of what I’ve been up to over the past couple of weeks.
In the beginning of March I went on a camping trip organized by UC San Diego. We drove to Anza Borrego Sate Park which is east of San Diego and does feel a lot like desert. During hundreds of thousands of years, water has slowly carved out caves in the sandy stone. We went in with helmets and headlamps and came out covered (and I mean fully covered) in dust. Some caves were wide enough to stand up in, others were crawling on all fours or on your belly only.
In one of the caves we got all the way in to the end where there was no opening to the outside and all of us turned our headlamps off. The darkness was some of the blackest I’ve ever experienced. It was so pitch black that your brain starts playing games with you, imagining shapes where there are none. You’re thinking “I see it, here is the edge”, and then, “smack” and you’re very happy to have a helmet on… We got to try to make our way out of that cave with our lights still turned off and just use our hands to feel our way. Much harder than you think it would be, but a really cool experience.
After the caves we washed off the dust in some hot springs, saw the dark sky start to fill up with stars and went to sleep with all the clothes we had packed on (two pair of pants, a fleece and a down jacket and a home knitted beanie in a 0°F sleeping bag was just perfect…).
The next morning we want to look at the super bloom. California is a lot of desert, but when the conditions are right (plenty of rain, moderate temperatures, winds etc) all the flowers that have been laying dormant during the dry season (could be for several years) burst open in a colorful flowering frenzy trying to attract pollinators (butterflies pimarily) that swarm on the fields. Even the cacti bloom. Of course you then get “flower watching stations” set up, the roadside fills up with parked cars, resourceful locals sell waterbottles, sunscreen and flower maps out of their cars and you have to criss cross between the selfie sticks. You can make fun of this and claim the desert ha nothing on a Swedish summer field, but regardless, it is pretty.
As the winter quarter has come to an end, I’ve had to present all he projects I’ve been doing in my different courses. Everything from building chloride sensors, to writing papers on the prospect of using the Arctic as a global shipping route when it will be seasonally ice free before mid-century. In my programming course I did a little project where I used a database of stars, there location and magnitude, and wrote some code that allows you to enter your location and time and it returns a map of the night sky visible right then. I made it in to a little animation too, below is all the stars you can see standing at the north pole.
Last but not least I did a little photo project in my climate change and global health course where we were asked to document local climate change. I decided to look at water quality and the health of surfers (any excuse to hang out at the beach…). I’ve read a bunch of articles about how rain, especially heavy rain that we are expected to see more of in San Diego in the future, affect the water quality in the ocean through washing off all sorts off pollutants and unpleasant things from sewers et cetera from the land before it ends up in the sea. The Tijuana River is a local problem that ofter floods when it rains leading to poorly treated sewage being released right into the ocean. Let’s just say there is a reason why the recommendation is to wait 48-72 hours after heavy rains before jumping in. See some of the photos I took for my project below.
It’s been an intense couple of weeks, but now everything is handed in and presented, all the exams are written and I’m officially on spring break for almost 10 days. Kind of funny that when the spring temperatures finally came to San Diego, I’m getting on a plane to go north to the snow. But I am very excited.
I’ll end with some pictures I took on an early morning road trip to the mountains south of Los Angeles with a friend to watch the sunrise over the poppy fields. I hadn’t seen orange poppies before, but apparently it is the state flower of California. They like orange here, their state fish is also orange, the Garibaldi. Funny.
As always, thank you for reading and take care.
I’m about to get on my flight. Canada – here I come!