Will our slice of the Pacific Ocean still be healthy in 2050?

Ask Ben Lyles, a former biology teacher, if the ocean off the coast of Southern California will still be a good place to swim or surf in, say, 2050, and he answers by saying how much he wants to teach one of his great-granddaughters to fish.

Two hurdles, he said, stand in his way: “Time and greed.”

The time thing is clear. Lyles is 88. And while he’s still vibrant (he spoke during a sunrise “power walk” on a bluff overlooking the beach at Crystal Cove State Park), he’s also only semi-hopeful of being around to explain the mysteries of saltwater baits and line weights and the surprising wiliness of rock cod to a girl who can’t yet speak in full sentences.

“She’s 2,” Lyles said. “We’ll see.”

The other issue, in Lyles’ view, is only slightly less obvious.

The one-time Los Angeles Unified School District employee and Redondo Beach-area computer salesman says his concept of greed applies to the pollution generated by himself and everybody else, from people who run big oil companies to the roughly 17 million other Southern Californians who do mundane things like commute to work and use plastic bags and flush toilets.

This collective version of “greed,” Lyles suggests, has already helped make it tougher (though not yet impossible) to catch a decent-sized halibut off a pier in Southern California. It’s also created one of the world’s biggest dumps of a particularly nasty chemical off the coast of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. It’s turned winter storms into bacterial nightmares at many local beaches. It’s led to oil spills and algae blooms, acidification and changing fish populations, dangerously high tides and crumbling coasts.

Lyles said his favorite fishing hole – the Pacific Ocean off Southern California – is changing, and not for the better.

“We (messed) it up,” he said, nodding at the ocean.

A lot of people, from scientists to activists to people who make a living from the ocean, agree with that basic premise, though often with many caveats.

“The ocean is still beautiful. And it’s still my favorite place to be. And people still want to live next to it,” said Joanna Schmidt, a real estate agent who sold homes in West Los Angeles before moving to Oregon last year.

“But a lot of the conversations you have when you’re taking people through those beautiful living rooms and looking out at the beautiful ocean is about the future,” she added.

“Everybody who is smart enough to have money to buy a house by the beach is smart enough to wonder how long it’ll last. Everybody knows there are a lot of problems, global warming and beach erosion and overfishing and all that. It’s real, it’s happening. People aren’t blind.”

“And it’s a gamble, right?” she added. “If the ocean dies, so does the Southern California lifestyle, in my opinion. You can’t have one without the other.”

When asked if she thinks the ocean in Southern California will be vibrant in 2050, Schmidt demurred, but noted this:

“I moved.”

Two things are true

The local ocean is under threat on several fronts.

Global warming isn’t just melting glaciers and boosting sea levels at a dangerous clip, it’s also making the ocean warmer and more acidic, killing off micro-organisms and reefs and the vast ecosystems they support. Meanwhile, plastics – in everything from toys to particulates used in wrinkle-free pants – are flowing from streams and storm drains at a pace to become the ocean’s single biggest inhabitant. And the region’s outdated sewers and water diversion systems are no match for increasingly powerful storms.

Yet for all that, scientists and activists don’t all use “free fall” to describe the health of the waters from Malibu to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Instead, they talk about this moment being at a potential tipping point.

While the ongoing degradation of the Pacific is a fact, it’s also a fact that more people than ever care about – and take steps to improve – ocean health. The ocean, it turns out, is popular. A July poll by the California Public Policy Institute found that 92% of state residents describe ocean health as “extremely” or “somewhat” important to the state’s economy and culture, and other surveys by other pollsters have produced similar results.

That popularity has translated into action. During this century, the public has backed dozens of large and small ocean-focused changes and projects – marine protection zones, habitat restoration programs, stronger laws against ocean pollution – that have helped to stave off environmental catastrophe. The number of beaches closed because of high bacteria counts was, until the past two years, improving statewide. And in some ocean areas off Orange County and Santa Monica, fish populations have been coming back.

For all the threats it faces, the local ocean remains alive and productive and a center for the region’s economic and cultural core.

The question is for how long.

Scientists and others suggest the next 25-year window will be critical.

New federal and state reports show how forces that are no longer preventable – including baked-in increases in sea levels and at least some ongoing acidification – will profoundly alter the local ocean between now and 2050. Coastal communities are at the most immediate risk, but the changes will be felt inland, too, with everything from the cost of fresh tap water to tourism jobs affected in some way by the overall health of the Pacific.

Some people who’ve been at the front lines of the fight to keep the ocean clean are non-committal on how it’ll play out.

“I don’t know if I’d say I’m optimistic or pessimistic,” said Garry Brown, founder and executive director of Coastkeeper, which over the past 25 years has worked with activists, legislators, lawyers and business interests to protect ocean and freshwater health in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

In that time, Brown’s organization has, among other things, helped reduce coastal runoff from housing projects, create storm-drain screens throughout the region, stymie the flow of ocean-bound garbage and generate new oyster beds in Newport Beach’s Back Bay.

It’s unclear if, going forward, such efforts will be enough.

“I’m more of a realist, I guess,” Brown said. “I’ve seen that just about anything is possible.”

Rising seas

The ocean off the coast of Southern California is 2.4 inches higher today than it was in 2000, according to the state’s newest five-year report on the rising sea, a draft version of which was released in January.

That number, seemingly tiny, is already changing our world. The rising ocean has been a direct or proximate cause for collapsing bluffs near rail lines in San Clemente, the creation of a water diversion system on Balboa Island, record-setting high tides in Manhattan Beach and Seal Beach, vanishing sands in the Palos Verdes Peninsula and Laguna Beach, and beach replenishment programs from Malibu to San Clemente.

And 2.4 inches is just a hint of what’s to come.

State scientists, in their report, say the ocean is almost certain to keep rising, though how fast, and how much, isn’t known. Their “intermediate” forecast, the one that’s viewed as most likely to happen because it incorporates modest efforts to reduce global warming and some long-running problems like melting glaciers, projects that the ocean will rise another 7.2 inches in Southern California over the next 25 years. After that, the rate of ocean expansion is expected to triple, with the model forecasting that by 2100 the ocean will be about 3 feet higher than it is today.

The 2050 number presents an expensive problem. The 2100 number could be catastrophic.

A 2020 study by economists at UCLA  found that nearly 11,000 homes statewide would be damaged for every 12-inch rise in the sea level, with Ventura, Malibu, Long Beach and the south coast of Orange County initially being among the areas hardest hit.

Last year, the U.S. Geological Survey – using historical data and photographs and satellite imagery, among other tools – projected that California also could lose three-quarters of its beaches by 2100. Some of the places the USGS says are likely to be hit hardest: Santa Monica, Newport Beach and Capistrano Beach.

The rising ocean is even playing a role in turning big storms, such as the record-setting rains that pelted the region over the past two winters, into environmental disasters.

From November 2023 through February, an estimated 38 million gallons of raw sewage flowed from Los Angeles County storm and sewer systems into the ocean. Experts attributed the rising ocean as a factor in those runoffs, as surges of water overwhelmed the antiquated storm and sewer drains that are common in Southern California.

“Our water infrastructure is about a century old. It’s not equipped to handle current conditions,” said Annelisa Moe, associate director of science and policy for Heal the Bay, a Santa Monica-based environmental group that tracks water quality issues in California.

“But with storms increasingly getting stronger and more water flowing, they’ll need to be rebuilt to handle what’s coming.”

In their report, state scientists described the combination of rising seas and bigger storms as a “glimpse of the future.”

“Today’s coastal storms … will become more damaging and dangerous as climate change and sea level rise continue. Coastal storms, coinciding with high tides under future sea level scenarios, will cause accelerated cliff and bluff erosion, coastal flooding and beach loss, and mobilization of subsurface contaminants.

“Sea level rise will increase the exposure of communities, assets, services and culturally important areas to significant impacts from coastal storms.”

Dirty history

For decades, Southern California residents, businesses and military bases used the local ocean as a trash can. We built sewage and drainage pipes into the ocean and let often-untreated waste get into the ecosystem. We sunk garbage and oil drums and old bombs. We took dirt from housing projects on land and dumped it, from barges, into areas that allowed chemicals and nutrients to flow back to shore.

A lot of that could come back to haunt our local ocean.

In the 1970s and ’80s, when we were aware of the environmental harm caused by untreated sewage and we were generally curbing that and other dirty habits, the state and federal government encouraged offshore oil exploration in Southern California. And as part of that effort, during a time when we believed we were running short of oil, we allowed oil companies to monitor their own underwater pipes.

That meant, often, underwater pipes haven’t been upgraded or replaced for decades.

Three years ago, one of those oil pipes, connecting onshore operations to drilling platforms off the coast of Huntington Beach, was hit by an anchor from a container ship. Several months after that, the pipe ruptured, spilling about 25,000 gallons of oil into the ocean near the Huntington Beach pier and nearby estuaries.

But that event could pale in comparison to what scientists view as a worst-case scenario connected to the so-called “Red Zone,” a stretch of continental shelf that runs about 15 miles off the coast of the Palos Verdes Peninsula and as the world’s biggest dump of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, a now-banned chemical commonly known as DDT that harms humans and animals.

Scientists, fishermen, SCUBA enthusiasts and others have long been aware of – and avoided – the Zone. Now banned, DDT is known to cause harm to human and animal life.

But that wasn’t always known. From 1947 through at least the early 1960s, Montrose Chemical Corporation ran a chemical plant in Torrance that used barges and the L.A. County sewer system to send barrels containing some 1,700 metric tons of DDT into the ocean. At the time, it was legal and the dumping ground eventually grew to be bigger than the city of San Francisco.

In the decades since, state agencies have warned commercial and recreational fishing operations to avoid deep water fish from the Zone. And in 1996, the area was declared an underwater Superfund Site.

But a study released earlier this year by scientists from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and San Diego State University (SDSU), suggests that the threat from the Red Zone might remain active. The new research shows, among other things, that the area is a possible source for DDT that’s turned up in the bodies of everything from bottom-feeding fish to dolphins and sea lions to California condors.

Critically, scientists found that DDT and related chemicals common in the Red Zone continue to enter the food chain and are detected in fish that, in theory, never go deep enough to have direct contact with the dumped DDT.

It’s not proven that the Red Zone is the only source for those chemicals, but the threat remains powerful.

“Regardless of the source, this is evidence that DDT compounds are making their way into the deep ocean food web,” said Margaret Stack, an environmental chemist at SDSU and the study’s lead author, in a report published by UC San Diego.

“That is cause for concern because it’s not a big leap for it to end up in marine mammals or even humans.”

In a succinct conclusion, the researchers wrote: “DDT pollution in (the Red Zone) should be recognized as an ongoing environmental concern requiring further research.”

Undead zone

In July, Sonia Murchison brought her children, ages 7 and 9, from their home in Brentwood to a beach clean-up day near Grandma’s house in Newport Beach’s Back Bay area.

“At home we play the ‘After Dinner Pick Up’ game, so the kids think putting away the dishes is cool stuff,” Murchison said, laughing. “I’m hoping this will be like that.”

More important, Murchison, who grew up surfing and swimming in Santa Barbara before moving to Los Angeles several years ago, said she wants her kids to love the ocean.

She said their family goes to the beach, near Santa Monica, and the kids love those outings. But she also said she always checks ahead if it’s considered healthy to swim, and as recently as Fourth of July weekend saw bacteria counts that led her to view swimming that day as “a hard no.”

“I just hope (the ocean) is around for them like it was for me,” she said. “I can’t imagine living around here if it’s a big dead zone or something.

“I don’t think it’ll ever be like that. I think it’ll be healthy,” she added.

“But who knows?”