San Diego beach water is turning bright pink
The water is going pink to further science.
If you've spent time online, you've likely seen headlines about rivers and lakes turning red, or purple. Often, that's due to algae, bacteria, or runoff in the water.
And now, the water at a San Diego beach is set to turn bright pink in the name of science.
Between January and February, researchers will be releasing environmentally-safe dyes into the estuary and surrounding coastline at Los Peñasquito beach to study how the buoyant freshwater in the area interacts with denser ocean water.
The study results will help quantify how estuaries transport sediment, pollutants, larvae, and other materials into the coastal ocean.
The study is called Plumes in Nearshore Conditions, or PiNC.
“I'm excited because this research hasn't been done before and it's a really unique experiment,” Scripps coastal oceanographer and leader of the PiNC study Sarah Giddings said in a statement.
“We're bringing together a lot of different people with different expertise, such that I think it's going to have some really great results and impacts. We will combine results from this experiment with an older field study and computer models that will allow us to make progress on understanding how these plumes spread.”
Drones will track the dye from the air, while sensors will get a ground view, along with a jetski outfitted with a measuring device.
Sensors will take data on several things, including ocean currents, wave heights, tides, salinity, and water temperature.
(Thumbnail credit: Erik Jepsen/UC San Diego)
