From Shore to Sea: New Technology for Identifying Underwater Archeological Sites and Landscapes

for for e for e for for e hello hello yeah okay we hear for for for for e e for for e e for e good evening hello everyone good evening um I want to start off by welcoming you to Channel Islands National Park and uh I want to acknowledge that we're not just there's some of you here in person but we are also streaming live so welcome to um everyone who is joining remotely uh so before we get started um as I said uh we are at the headquarters of Channel Islands National Park but it's also important that we remind ourselves and ground ourselves of the land that we are on today we are all sitting in the ancestrial homeland of the Chumash people um Chumash are still present in their communities today and it's important that when we talk about the Chumash we don't just do it in the past tense they are active they're thriving and present in the communities and still maintain the connection with the islands which they call home um so where are you right now and side we are in our Auditorium so before we get started with everything I just want to point out some safety features uh so over here to your right you have two sets of double doors these are exits that you can use in the case of of an emergency we also have an exit back there and please feel free to come in and out at your leisure uh there are bathroom facilities outside to the right as well as a water fountain and we ask that once this program wraps up in the evening uh please be safe drive slow as you make your way out of the harbor um and before we get started I'm going to ask if you can please silence your cell phones so that way we minimize the distractions and um we give our presenter tonight uh uh some attention so today is also pretty significant it's pretty special uh because the shortest SE lecture Series has been on a bit of a high aest for a few years and um since I started here I've had people come to me and ask when is it starting when is it starting so we're excited to finally be here the last in-person short toy lectures was in early 2020 so it's been a bit of a road to get here so all of you who have played a part in making this happen and bringing it back you know who you are very proud of you and thank you for all of your effort to make this happen um so my name is Jasmine Reinhardt I am the program manager of interpretation education and volunteers here at the park and I am happy to see a lot of familiar faces um a very active volunteer core that we have and I'm also happy to see some new faces and when I see that it um to me I see it as a reminder that um there are we have we're building a generation of stewards to protect these places for future generations and I think seeing this as a testament to that so be because we have some of you in person and this is also being live streamed this means uh we are really uh trying to be mindful that this is available to people that have multiple abilities so throughout this program you're going to hear some AIO describing um and I'm going to give an example of that right now so as I said my name is Jasmine Reinhardt um I'm a short uh woman with a brown and blondish curly hair and I am standing in front of um in front of a Podium that has an arrowe head and behind me over the letters and the words that R Channel Islands National Park uh over to my left there is a screen and that's where the Pres presentation is going to start and um I will let the presenter do that uh description when she gets here um but you're going to hear some of that throughout the night and again that is our effort to make sure that people multiple abilities can also have a similar experience and understand what you all may be seeing um so that said too for folks who are joining us remotely um as this is being live streamed there's also Live cast passs so um again we are making our effort to make this as accessible as possible so we appreciate your patience as we strive uh to make that happen so uh as we get started uh to introduce our guest speaker I'm actually going to introduce someone else so I would like to introduce uh Dr Kristen haa who is uh the Channel Islands National Park archaeologist and if you can join me giving Dr Kristen HPP a round of applause so she can introduce our guest speaker thank [Applause] you okay thanks Jasmine hi everyone in the room and uh tuning in from afar I will follow Jasmine's lead and describe I'm standing at the same Podium I'm a short woman with very short brown hair uh and I'm just really thrilled to be introducing Dr Amy gusk Amy has more than two decades of experience working on the Channel Island she's worked throughout the Pacific she does both terrestrial and underwater archaeology an expert in the uh peopling of the Americas in Maritime cultural landscapes and she's currently the curator of anthropology at the uh Natural History Museum of Los Angeles so very happy to have you here thank you Amy [Applause] all right thank you uh sounds like that's on everyone can hear hear me okay all right great thanks so much um very happy to be here uh and obviously to continue uh I am at the same Podium with the presentation on my left uh I am a tall woman also with short hair um and uh I am wearing a blue sweater um so uh thank you so much everybody for being here and everybody that's online I'm really excited to talk to you about my uh some of research that I'm involved with um so this is research that I've been involved with since about 2012 and I'm the person that gets to stand here and talk to you about it but it's really a huge team of people that um conducts this research lots of different agencies have assisted us with this over the last number of years um and I am going to be talking to you about some of the interesting fings that we've had um over the past uh about the past five or six years we've had some interesting finds come up uh so uh again to my left is my first slide and the title at the top reads interdisciplinary Partnerships new technologies and the submerged cultural landscapes of the Southern California bite below that my name Amy gusk curator anthropology and below that I have a logo from the Natural History Museum Los Angeles County uh and there is a image in the background of a nice Coastal scene um with some waves lapping at the shoreline there and um some kind of little small in the background um so let me without further Ado hop into the presentation um so uh this slide just shows uh to orient everyone to where I'm talking about though since you're sitting here at the channel Allen National Park headquarters I'm sure everyone is very familiar uh with this but I am showing a map that has uh of the Southern California bite of the kind of northern part of the Southern California bite that has starts at the top of the screen from point conception um all the way down um through Los Angeles and Long Beach um and then it shows the offshore Islands the Channel Islands archipelago um and to the right of the map I have a number of images of all of the wonderful Marine um uh ecosystems and animals that surround the Chanel islands and I also have a tucked in there a little picture from um Catalina Island of a rock outcrop where with some kind of uh bowls that are being being made there um so this is the area that I'm going to focus on um and I appreciate the introduction that um recognize that this is the ancestral uh lands of the shash who are thriving um group today um and actually um U some members from the shimes community were part of this research as well which I will talk about as we go through so I have the cha Islands archipelago here um the northern group of islands San uh San Miguel Santa Rosa Santa Cruz and anac Kappa and below that I have the shash names for the islands so that's what you see there below that in parenthesis and then the southern Islands San Nicholas Santa Barbara Santa Catalina and S Clemente again the um the um indigenous names for the Islands below that so the eight islands that make up the archipelago um are really just an absolutely wonderful place to conduct research um one for just the absolute abundance of um of marine resources that are there and so for me as an archaeologist who's interested in early Maritime um culture Maritime societies um this is really a hot spot for the type of research that I'm really interested in so I I I am particularly interested in understanding how Maritime cultures in particular migrate into new areas for the first time so the time period that I like to focus on is relatively early um about 8 to 13,000 years ago and even older than that and I'm interested in how people kind of migrated into this area so looking at the the the northern islands is really an ideal place for this for a number of reasons which all which I'll get to but one of the big ones certainly is because of just the abundance of resources and you can see some of them over there the Dolphins fish all sorts of sea mammals shellfish uh the giant kelp forest that are off there that all creates just this wonderful really rich marine environment that was really a huge draw and still is a huge draw for all sorts of people today um obviously um and I would be remiss if I didn't talk about the terrestrial portions of the island today that are just absolutely abundant with lots and lots of of uh terrestrial with lots and lots of plants um I think you know there was a previously in in kind of anthropological thought um you know years and years ago there was the idea that if you have these islands offshore that there why would anybody ever want to go there because they're not going to have as many resources as this you know really you know large Mainland next to it very abundant Mainland um but really the islands have just an absolute huge biodiversity of plants particularly for their size um so obviously there's a lot more on the mainland but for their size they're extremely extremely which um so I have just some images here on this this next slide which has the same map on it um but off to the off to the left I guess you're right um there are um images of some kind of characteristic plants from um the island s island paintbrush um Santa Cruz Island Duda Indian Paintbrush um China Island bedstraw Santa Cruz Island Ironwood and the Tory Pines of course which sure um one of the you know just two Groves known here um in in California um so uh really a wonderful place to work um and not only for the very very rich natural history in the ecosystem but also certainly for the the culture history of the islands and so um this slide uh which I I'll actually go through kind of as I'm talking so I'll kind of um talk about uh the for um I'll talk about I'll visually describe it as I'm kind of going along um so I have a a list of some of the kind of major culture history aspects of the island here here um the first one is certainly the archaeological timeline so these islands in terms of archaeological understanding um have the first evidence we have um in the archaeological record is from about 13,000 years ago um it's probably more about like 18,000 years ago there is some some suggestion that it's actually more about 18,000 years ago at this point um there are thousands and thousands and thousands of cultural sites that are attributed to the maritime shash peoples um and I do want to mention too that um when I do talk about these uh kind of dates and and timelines I am using an archaeological history um I do want to point out that shash history considers this to be time in Memorial that they've been on the islands um and so I just want to point out that I am using archaeological history throughout most of the talk um and so then uh that 13,000 years of prehistory um just thriving communities on these islands um and then colonialism hits uh 1542 Cabrio comes over uh lands on S Miguel actually died on S Miguel in 1543 um and um then it it's kind of changed the character of The Island since then um in the 1800s uh the shimes uh most of the shimes were taken um off the islands into various missions within Southern California um but you know again um as was mentioned previous to this talk um they remain a very thriving Community today um and very resilient um and the continuity of indigenous knowledge is something that's actually very important to not only This research um but also um me in general um and then 1800s you have otter and seal trade um on these islands 1815 to 1900s Chinese Abalone fishing and sheep ranching um moving on into the 1900s to all the way up until 1998 cattle ranching um and then 1938 Channel Island's National monument and aapa and Santa and um Santa Barbara Islands um the 20th century all the way through to 2011 you have deer and elk hunting on Santa Rosa Island you had US military activities um from um the world wars and the Korean war on the islands and then and certainly 86 to the present you have the National Park Service um that owns and manages um the owns and our manages a majority of the islands and then The Nature Conservancy um help owns two-thirds of Santa Cru Island since 1978 so it's a really rich culture history on the island lots have been going on certainly there for at least 13,000 probably 18,000 years um and the images that I have on here um up on the left um at the top I have a um a Tamal crossing a shim tal Crossing um going from the mainland over to Santa Cruz Island U below that a historic photo of some um shash men um and then below that um some historic photos showing um the the Abalone um uh fishing um as well as some of the ranching era um with horses some picture that I love with these cattle kind of running down the running down the pier there um as well as some um military um history photos as well um so when I first started working on the islands and kind of thinking about the islands um it it was really amazing to me to find out just the absolute sheer number of cultural sites that are on these islands um this is actually a picture from Santa Cruz um but really just a vast amount of of cultural sites um on these islands and what's really amazing is that they show um a very very dense grouping of what are called we call paleo Coastal sites um and so these sites date to about 13,000 to about 8,000 years ago and this is particularly significant and interesting for me because this time period represents some of the earliest time periods on this island in terms of of human history of this island and it's during this time period that you have lots and lots of environmental changes particularly in the beginning of this time period 13,000 to about 10,000 years ago there's just a lot going on and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second so I'm really interested to better understand how are people utilizing these islands at this time how are people migrating around what kinds of resources are there how are the how is a landscape changing and how are people responding to that um so this is something that's particularly interesting um to me um and I just want to point out too that the the slide that we're looking at now at at now has um this is a a very large cultural site um called Puna Arena um and it's an absolutely very very large all of this material there we go uh this entire thing here is a very large um shell mid site very large culture inside you can see here for reference these are people uh and so this is the site you can really really see how big it is and so um for those um that may not be able to to see this slide there is it's kind of hard to describe scale um but I have an image of um a couple folks sitting next to a very very very large um site um and kind of behind that you have um G island and then the ocean behind that just to kind of show scale of how large some of these sites are the um cultural sites that are on the islands really vary um some of them are absolutely enormous and some of them are very very small really really vary this just happens to be a quite large one this one actually does date to about the earliest side early State about 10,000 years old okay um so I just wanted to mention that in in some of these sites and particularly in some of the early sites I have some images up here that show um on the uh left hand side of the screen here that show um a a typical um typical but kind of a relatively dense shell mid site um as well as part of an excavated unit here on the bottom that shows a very very dense um kind of cultural um evidence of kind of some some habitation and then um some some Dune sand and then as well as kind of evidence of habitation again here but you can see kind of how dense this is this one dates to about um 9,000 years old so very very dense and then in the the center of the screen here I have images of a number of different types of um of um technology and these all this interesting thing about this technology is all of this is really indicative of of early habitation on the islands so you have what are called um a mall points um on the left here in this this image crescents in the center which is basically a transverse projectile Point um so this would kind of be the the front of the point if you will here and then a and a shaft would we put onto the back of it there and then China Island Barb points as well excuse me um and then up here in the corner I have an image of a a friend and colleague of mine Christina Gil holding some charred um corns from Blue dicks on the island uh just showing again the importance of uh thinking about plants and the importance of plants on the island particularly to people um particularly the sh match that were living there um so one thing that you see in a lot of these sites really from the earliest time period is a really really Adept use of Maritime resources and Technology from at least 13,000 years old and what's interesting about some of this technology is that where it's found and the type of technology that it is may suggest that we're that they may have been next to Wetland or estuary sites um but we currently don't have any estuaries on the island that we know of in this particular area um and in on the areas that some of these are found in so one of the things that we were kind of thinking about in terms of this is well where where are these estuaries were there actually estuaries on the island because these are really really big draws for for habitation lots of different kinds of resources um in these types of environments and so that's something that we're particularly interested in understanding is um how does the island change through time um particularly in this really early time period And so what I'm showing here is an image um of the northern Channel Islands um as well as all of the landscape around what are currently the northern Channel Islands that's now been submerged due to sea level rise so you have the the current land masses um of the Channel Islands um are four distinct land masses of the northern Channel Islands are four distinct land masses anaka um Santa Rosa Santa Cruz and um oh sorry San Miguel I went backwards San Miguel Santa Rosa Santa Cruz and anac Kappa and then around the islands um there's kind of a brown and then greenish area that that extends out and actually connects all four of the islands together and that represents the amount of land at 15,000 years ago so this is before glaciers melted um or kind of as Glaciers are melting um during the last ice age and all the water that's trapped in those glaciers going into the ocean and then sea levels are rising um and so when people were first on these islands there was a lot more land that they could have utilized than what we see now and so what does that look like as you kind of go through time in terms of sea level rise so this is at about 15,000 years ago the next slide that I'm showing is about 10 and 1 half thousand years ago and that amount of submerged land has reduced quite quite a bit um so that slide shows again those same four land masses but then um less submerged land around it uh next slide is 9 and a half thousand years ago again just kind of shows that at this point um there is uh much less land submerged land surrounding the islands and I I want you to pay attention to in between Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa here there's this area that looks pretty interesting it looks like a large Bay um so this is something that was pretty interesting to us when we first started thinking about doing some of this research on the islands and understanding how did the northern Channel Islands go from the larger super island where all four Islands were connected um before um sea level rise during the last elal maximum to how did they go from being San Ros to the northern Channel Islands and what did that look like what changed Through Time what were these habitats that were inundated through time um so we really started focusing on this area here and I'll talk about that a little bit more um as we go on um and so the the last slide I'm showing here um again has the same map on it it has the current land masses of four uh Northern Channel Islands um and it still shows a little bit of submerged land around them but all the islands are now separated um and this is the extent of land mass at about 8,500 years ago um so I just want to mention that when we think about this if you can think about it in numbers it's more than 200 square kilometers of land mass was submerged by Rising seas that sounds like a lot and it actually is 75% of the land that was above sea level when people first got to the islands is now submerged so that's pretty impressive if you think about the fact that we have on the island over 100 cultural sites that date between about 8,000 to about 13,000 years ago and that represents only 25% of the land that people had available to them at that particular time period so this was absolutely fascinating to me this kind of how you think about that as someone that's that's interested in in understanding the kind of this this past time period I was thinking well you're only getting 25% of the story right um I mean there's so much of more that's down there so the identification of these terminal Pine Land Services and habitats that might have survived Marine transgression is pretty difficult so we're looking for sites we're looking to understand how do you find sites that have been submerged by sea level um and there's a number of things you have to think about um you have to think about where might they have been initially on the landscape and also importantly would they have survived Marine would they have survived Marine transgression um the sea level rise um that's a really big one because as I'm sure all of you know we don't have a very calm ocean out here there's lots of waves there's lots of changes there's lots of current um and that really does destroy that Continental shell so that submerged part um of the once terrestrial landscape so identifying accurate locations of preserved uh paleosols which are these um these um development of kind of sediments and soils on the terrestrial environment um where those have been preserved is what we're looking to try to find um and that will help us understand better how the landscape changed and the types of environments that may have been around Santa Ros during the time period that people um initially got to the islands um and so the way that we're going about this and I'm going to um dive kind of into the research here um this slide I'm showing a map um again of the uh Northern Channel Islands as well as the adjacent mainland from point conception down to about Ventura um and I have um on the um on the map um off of North of San Miguel Island Santa Rosa Island and in between Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz in between Santa Cruz and anaca and north of anaca um I have all sorts of different lines on here um and all those lines correspond to uh different types of um mapping that we've done with submerged instruments and trying to understand this landscape um I also have lines off of vent on the mainland um golita on the mainland as well and off of Point conception so these are all the areas that we have focused on for this research um on the very um the on the the right hand side of the page I have a number of logos um Natural History Museum laa tarpits scripts institution of oceanography um the University of North Carolina Wilmington University of Oregon San Diego State University s Banes Indians National Park Service Europe ocean energy management and Noah ocean exploration um these are just some of the partners that we've had um in this research and I just wanted to describe these for some of the viewers online um so this ongoing research on Paleo landscape and paleo environment really includes um a huge interdisciplinary team of people to try to better understand the submerged environment and mapping that that paleo landscape kind of mapping this this cultural landscape the Paleo landscape and understanding how it changed through time um we're really interested in in trying to understand eventually not only migration Pathways but terminal P toine um how meditation and we're particularly interested in understanding better and more effective underwater archaeological modeling and methods um and as part of that we've also been thinking about new technologies that we can include and new ways we can kind of think about this problem underwater archaeological work has been going on for a long time um and we're just now really starting to um think outside the box I think in a lot of ways on how we can really start to do this research really effectively and so hopefully this talk tonight will show you kind of how we're starting to do some of this um so the first um thing that I wanted to mention or kind of um discovery that I wanted to to tell you about uh is um so this slide has a a location map um up at the top Corner again of the northern islands and the adjacent Mainland um from point conception down to vura and then it has a blowout on the map um of an area that we're focusing on called Crescent Bay which is in between Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa Island um and the image of Crescent Bay has uh Santa Rosa Island is uh that shows two cultural sites um on the Eastern side of the island and then it shows the western side of Santa Cruz Island um and it has a series of um six cultural sites that it shows on this uh western side of the island um as well as some offshore um lines uh that represent where we've done some of some of this underwater research um so the reason why we really wanted to focus on Crescent Bay and this is what I mentioned in that kind of sea level rise is that if you can see here these are the islands now but these this white line here this is the the Paleo Shor line as it's modeled based on depth to sea floor um and extent of sea level rise so there's lots of different models that look at the extent of sea level rise during last glacial maximum so one of the ways that we try to understand where paleo shorelines were is that we just essentially take that formula and we uh model depth to the seafloor which is helpful um um but in some ways um it can be refined better and so that's one thing that we were trying to do in this area and I'll talk to you about how how we do that in a minute um so on this um next slide here I have that same map of the Crescent Bay Area specifically and then I'm going to go through the text that's on the left left hand side of the page here um the reason why we're really focused on this area is not only because of the interesting batry but also because of the onshore archaeological work and the cultural sites that that have been identified on both sides of this of Crescent Bay so the Eastern side of Santa Rosa and the western side of Santa Cruz um you have a site um s708 which is um right here on the Eastern side of of Santa Rosa Island um this site dates to about 11,000 years old it had Venus clam and about 600 water fowel well this is quite interesting 600 water fowl bones this is interesting because this insinuates some sort of estuary um and we do know that there is evidence of a Paleo Estuary around this area on on on Santa Rosa Island um a little bit south from that you have s77 which has some estor clam in it um and then you actually if we're hopping across over to the western side of Santa Cruz Island you have um the SC 857 um which is uh over here on an area called Black Point um which is um on the western side kind of northern part of Santa Cruz Island um and um at that area you have esterine clam that ages to about 11,400 years old um so again Estuary but we don't have evidence of an estuary being in that area we don't know where it is um and then you also have at 860 and 861 on Santa Cruz Island um chipstone crescents so again these chipstone crescents what I showed before these are these ones that are really indicative of some sort of wetland um possibly some sort of wetland those are typically found um those these have been found near near to Wetlands um but we just don't have that Wetland environment there um that we know of there at the time so we were really interested in understanding is there these kind of wetland estra environments off of this um and then we have right south of that um a DOT that has SC 54754 9798 now these sites actually date to about 88500 but they actually show a pretty big difference in terms of um the the the constituents that were in the site and what that means in terms of thinking about the environment um this site actually showed a lot of Rocky Shore um species muscles black Abalone it had a small amount of Pismo clam um as well as some Little Neck clam which in Sandy Shore Spees but this 3,000 year time difference between these areas which are relatively you know close in proximity um and the kind of varing Technologies we didn't get any of these crescents or any of that that early technology in these kind of younger sites um they really present that are presented in both these clusters of paleo coal sites likely reflect a really rapidly evolving loral system as you start to see these sea levels rise and so this is what we really interested in kind of um figuring out more about um so considering this area of Crescent Bay um was likely a sizable flood playing with adjacent Wetland habitats during the terminal Pine and earliest hallene um and so this um this idea was really put forth by my colleague John lingon um who was really thinking about this and thinking like let's really kind of focus on this area he's done a lot of this kind of early work um on the islands as well so what did we do um so this is where we get into more of the technology aspect of this talk um so on this slide it's be a little bit more difficult to describe um but on the uh on the left side of the slide I have an image of a subbottom profiler so this is a piece of equipment that we use to understand um what the SEF Flor looks like um what this does is it sends down it's a sonar system essentially it sounds sends down sound waves um and it actually Maps what's beneath the sea floor um it sends back these kinds of black and white images that you see here and um it it can pick up variations in sediment essentially so if you have Marine sediment as an example on top of a terrestrial sediment it'll pick that up it'll it'll pick up that kind of break in the different types of sediment they have different densities different photies um and so it actually picks that up this is um part of the this is part of the research that's really really driven by our marine geology colleagues this type of work and these types of equipment are used very very frequently in Marine geology to understand things like fault systems um and all sorts of different um all sorts of different aspects of the um the the geologic environment um of the seafloor um and so up top um what we're looking for here and what our our marine geology colleagues um really uh kind of focused on was trying to understand where are these paleo shorelines located um are they actually in these areas that we think they are based on this bemet and based on depth of the seafloor or um is is it being skewed because you have a layer of of marine sediment so Marine sediment can be relatively shallow it can be a meter it can be 50 cm on top of terrestrial sediment or it can be extremely deep we have colleagues that work up in Oregon um that actually have found that there's 20 meters of marine sediment that has been brought in with sea level rise on top of old terrestrial surfaces that were above sea level um before Seas started Rising so thinking about this we wanted to try to find where are these paleo shorelines um and so the Paleo Shoreline angle um is what they were looking for in this and so this area on top of here is um Marine sediment and then on the bottom here this is actually the old kind of terrestrial surface and so with these paleo Shoreline angles they were able to determine that where we think the shoreline was is actually not necessarily where it is and here's an example of that um so here these X's here that say 40 40m is a 40 meter Shoreline um based on our subbottom profiling this line here that kind of swiggles all the way out here um is it based on vetry or kind of depth sea FL and you can see here there's a almost a 2 and 1 half km difference between that location so instead of this Shoreline looking like this it probably was a little bit closer to going straight more straight across and kind of going out this makes a huge difference in terms of us thinking about coastal areas and Coastal habitats and where people may have been kind of utilizing these kinds of resources um and so we started to focus on this area and we actually dropped a series of cores these blue dots on this map here um or sorry the purple dots on the map here uh show some Cordes that that we put in um based on some of this this work um and what we actually identified were paleosols um so we did actually find Wetland and estoy sediments um in these areas that we were hoping to actually find them um so the image that I'm showing now uh has the same map of the Crescent Bay um in the middle of the screen here um I'm showing the subbottom profiler images uh this has kind of a black and white image and it actually shows the four cores that you can see kind of put into the SE floor as well as a kind of orange and yellow interpreted images of a Paleo Valley um so it shows us paleo Valley with smaller nested kind of Channel features um and we think we thought some fluvial estaran deposits filling the Paleo valy and so we put in four cores within this feature and on the very right here you can see the core this is actually just one one core shown in three different ways um this image here is the optical um view of the core uh and then there's kind of a a CT scan of the core in the center and then a a core log which is like a drawn image of the core and you can see pretty clearly here that there's a a pretty good break at about 75 cm this is Marine sediment on top of this terrestrial sediment and this kind of um at about 85 CM down the core you start to see kind of a brown and then going into kind of black um um kind of black um splotches across this brown area and um those are actually Ryon so romes um are part of the plant um and we think in this case it's actually Tuli Reed um which colonize shallow lakes and Riverbanks um and by this date here that we have on the Marine sediment that's at top of this um the Paleo paleosol um that suggests that there was a local area of wetland habitat that was present prior to 7600 years ago which actually matches up in terms of when sea level was rising in this area um so this was actually pretty exciting for us because we set out to find terrestrial sediments and evidence of where the sediments may be and we found them which was great um and uh so it doesn't always work out like that um and we are actually doing more research on these cores this year we're going to be doing some pollen analysis as well as some phytolith analysis so we're going to be able to really be able to narrow down the types of plants that were here um and really to help be able to Define this kind of wetland possibly Estuary system that maybe helps um explain some of this kind of archaeology that we're seeing onshore um and really helps us to better understand the Paleo ology and development of this kind of um the Paleo landscape and kind of what that looks like through time um and so that was kind of one one uh one of the first phases of This research and so with that part of the research you know this is something that just kind of builds and builds and builds right you start to get information um and then we start to think of new ways and other ways that we can better understand this landscape and so the next slide that I have here it's titled car culture and environment um um and um I have a number of photos that I'm going to describe um one of them um up at the top left there is a picture of a tar seat a submerged tar seat um and then on the right I have an image of a whole bunch of very small little fragments that my colleagues over at the that the lia tarpits identified um from Lia tarpits this is not from our research it's from my colleagues at Lia tarpits um but there's all sorts of really cool things that tar can trap I think a lot of people when they think about tar and when they think about the La brya tarpits in particular everybody thinks about megap saber Troth cats which are certainly very cool um but along with the all of those really big megap that are in um in the tar seeps there's also a whole bunch of little things that get trapped in there that really help to define the Paleo environment paleoecology so as an example um in this image there's a very small Leaf fragment rodent tooth an insect leg a rodent claw a beetle Wing a juniper seed a freshwater clam shell and a lizard jaw so all of these kinds of small bits of the ecosystem really help us to understand what was that ecosystem like so we thought wouldn't it be super cool if we could find submerged tar seeps that can provide some of this information for us um in in thinking about how the ecosystem looked like how that ecosystem evolved through time um so this was one of our our goals and that P eological part of it was was a a big part of it but also thinking about the shoe mash and thinking about the use of tar through time was also very important to us so tar and asphaltum is been a very very important resource for a long time for people particularly in this area um particularly with the shash the Tonga people that lived kind of on the coast it was used as a waterproofing agent um it was used as an adhesive um lots of different uses for it um and there are no known tar seeps on the CH on the northern Channel Islands themselves so this was always really interesting to us as well because we there we do think and there have been tar seeds that have been historically mapped offshore from from the Channel Islands but still on that Santa Ros landscape so still on the landscape that would have been sub aial at 13,000 years old so we really wanted to understand where what is the distribution of tar seeds and can we find these these tar seats um in the submerged environment what can it tell us about paleoecology and then we can add that that into understanding the landscape much better um and understanding the distribution of resources that were very useful to people's living on the island as well um and so just for the other images um on this slide on the bottom left I have um Again part of a tal Crossing with the shes Community carrying those tomal um into the ocean um and then an example of a projectile Point using tar as an adhesive and it's halfed to a shaft um on the kind of bottom um on the bottom uh right hand side of the screen there so this is where we start to get into some really more um kind of instrument use and technology that I get really excited about um so as part of the work that we were doing I mentioned that we use this the sonar equipment and the sonar equipment is great the sub bottom profiler it really does show um I mean the fact that you can see what's below the SE FL is absolutely fantastic but as we were thinking about how do we really effectively find par hydrocarbon in the environment we had to kind of think well we need to start incorporating something else into this um we had try to go we had tried to look or identify a tar seep using the sub bottom profile and it didn't work out very well we couldn't really see it very well even though it was a known map tar seep so we turn to our friends um at scripts institution of oceanography in their um in their um their electromagnetic their em lab that Comm Magnetic Lab and they actually have equipment that uses a completely different type of Technology uses electromagnetism rather than sound um and what this is really really good for is finding hydrocarbon um it's used a lot by the oil and gas industry to find tar oil all sorts of things in the submerged environment um and we basically modif I say we when I mean my colleagues at at scripts I cheered them on while they modified this equipment I have no idea how how I know how to use this now but I have no idea how you actually build it you have some very smart people that I'm fortunate enough to work with um that actually are able to modify this equipment um to better work for purposes of what we want it for to kind of understand better a more shallow um portion of the submerged landscape a lot of this is built for understanding like 200 meters below the seaf Flor like really really deep um you know oil reserves that the O gas industry may be interested in so basically how this type of Equipment Works is it measures the essentially it measures the paracity of of of the the seaf FL so what it does a really good job of is understanding if you have some sort of car or some sort of more kind of fluid or viscous U material next to a sediment um and so that's what this is really really good for and so we this hadn't as far as we know had not been used for any types of any type of kind of archaeological or cultural underwater archaeological work and we used it in concert with our um with our subbottom profiler um and so the image that I'm showing now is just to give you an idea of what the data looks like from this controlled Source electromagnetic instrument or CSM um so on the screen here on the top left I have an image of the Lolita tar seep so this is a really well-known well studied tar seep it's just a little bit south of Isa Vista right offshore um an ISO Vista um on the top right I have a colorful diagram that has um five different um lines from the controlled Source the CSM um there's a combination of Darker blue and lighter blue and then aligns you can see the yellow and kind of the red coming up at the top that red is the resistive part uh of these data um and that's where the oil is essentially that's where the the tar is basically um and so then from that I have the red kind of Arrow going across to a closeup of one of these uh profiles from the CSM um and you can see there is a kind of a rainbow of colors um there's there's blue kind of fading up um to the top into a very concentrated area of red that's the logo Le SE so you can see what this looks like when you look at these data kind of coming up um sometimes you have to do a little bit more interpretation but we have our colleagues at scripts that do that for us um and with us rather um and so uh you can see kind of what that looks like so that's really what we're looking for something that looks a lot like that sometimes you may see kind of you know more red kind of coming up and you can actually see the fissures coming up and and leading to this um to this this this tar seep um but that's essentially the type of data that we're looking at um from this type of instrument so what we've done is we started to combine um both of the subbottom data uh which is this image on the bottom here which I'll describe in a second um as well as the um CSM instrumentation so on the left side of the screen um I have an image at the top of a bimetric image offshore of s Miguel Island that has a number of lines and colors on it um pinks and greens and and some oranges in there which actually shows the track lines from our ship and then um all of the pinks and greens show the um different interesting parts of it from either the CSM data or from the the chirp data from the sub bottom data um just below that map I have a one of the profiles from the CSM data um which actually shows some uh blue and yellow and then some red splotches on it which are uh the the hydrocarbons that we're looking for um and then below that I have a collocated image of a um subbottom profiler which is kind of black and white um and it shows uh not only the seaf Flor but also these kind of images coming up here um which is collocated with with the the red on the CSM image um and so this is something coming up into the water column so this is a seaf Flor and this up here as the water column this could mean gas it could mean something kind of coming up into there so we were really excited about this because um it shows some sort of image on both of our instruments that we have um which is really quite exciting um and so we have we identified five different signals that were present in various places in in all of our study areas um and which I'll show you in a minute um and we we called them names that stringy discreet waterfall hyack and blotchy those were just what they looked like P descriptive in general um this profile as I mentioned is off of Samuel um Island um it's where a historic documentation indicates the presence of a tar seat so we were super excited about trying to get out here cuz it looks like um we had found it um and so this image is just some of the areas that we um that we um did the research at uh on the top left I have again the map um of the northern islands with the adjacent Mainland um and off of Point conception um I have a red box which shows the area that we conducted research off Lolita another red box um again showing where the research was same to the north of San Miguel and the north of anaca red box that show where the research are on the right side of the screen I have closeups of all of the areas um that we did that research at Point conception San Miguel Island Co point and anac Kappa Island um each of those images show the the lines from the ship um so that's our that's our track lines and it shows exactly where we conducted This research um and then on there you kind of see those blotches and those are the target points that we were really excited about so uh we actually and we went out um on a a large called the Sally Ride um that's um operated through scripts um in January of 2023 um and we unfortunately happened to be out there during the atmospheric river that we had during that time period uh so we dropped down our ROV our remote operated vehicle um onto these points um and this was pretty much what we saw um and for those online um where that need um that need a description of this it's basically a green box uh that uh has some kind of fuzzy black dots in it um that shows very very little visibility um in the offshore area um in most the areas that we went to so uh being the creative scientist that we are we kind of very quickly thought well we have this very large ship that's very expensive um and all of these people on here uh there is you know I think about 30 I think it's about 30 to 40 people that are on the ship between the science crew and the ships crew uh you don't get a second chance um so we uh made certainly made the best of it um and one of the areas that we were able to had relatively good visibility was north of anaa Island so anaka Island um was interesting to us not necessarily because we thought that there were tar seeds but because there seemed to be a lot of hydrocarbon activity off of the island itself um and so on this slide on the left hand side I have um an image at the top that shows our track lines off of the north side of anaka Island um that has Bunches of colors on it so all those colors kind of show that there's something interesting to us that came up on the the CSM system as well as the sub bottom system so there was lots of interesting things out there but none of them looked particularly tar seepy if you will um and uh you can see right below this I have a profile from the CSM um which is again is uh very colorful it's got yellows and blues um and lots of Reds kind of over to the right side of the south side of the profile um and that's indicative of hydrocarbon um and then below that I have the um subbottom profiler images again a black and white image that shows um kind of the the sea floor here and then back to that image again um shows the sea floor uh and then you know these these um kind of dark uh black um lines going up into the white of the um of the water column there um so lots of different kinds of interesting things were happening off of an aappa and one thing that we also noticed out there is there was a lot of pock marks on the sea floor um and so on the right I have an image um again of the um some of our of our um track lines and then below that I have an image of the sub bottom that show a lot of pock marks in the sea floor um as well as some water column noise it's called water column noise from a subbottom profiler again these kind of black marks going up into the water column um that we were indic that indicated to us maybe some sort of gas or something like that so we decided to um really explore a lot of areas off of an aappa um we did this for a number of days um to really explore These acoustic signatures that were um kind of collocated with the CSM signatures um and what we actually ended up finding this is why these interdisciplinary um projects are really really awesome um we ended up finding um one of the first known shallow water cold seeps in Southern California now this was between an archaeologist a marine geologist and a marine geophysicist what we didn't have on board was a Marine marine biologist which would have been very helpful in this case um but we had our ROV operators who would work with a ton of marine biologists um and we started to see on the left side of the screen here you can see these bacterial mats so I have six images of the seafloor which is kind of a brown seafloor um with some fish in it few few little fish um and then some white mats that cover it um on the right side of the screen um I have another image of a um the shallow water cold seep U it's a methane seep so there's a number of different types of cold seep this one's a methane one um and you can on the image there is a the background is a brown seafloor with white um mat kind of a white splotches across of it and there's all sorts of little urchins on it that was one of the things that we saw in the rlv kind of coming up lots of urchins and we were really confused at first um but then we started to see these mats and put two and two together um and then uh the image that I have on the bottom of the screen is a series of a block of four different images um that show uh a um a little bit of a a carbonate structure which is what's created by the the bacteria that eat the methane um and there's bubbles that kind of that were coming out of it if it was Disturbed it would actually have bubbles pop out of it so those were methane bubbles kind of coming out coming out of that so the mat within the pox that we saw on the seaflo on the bemet um and this really explained why we were getting so much of an indication of hydrocarbons and this area because there's lots of hydrocarbons in this area in the form of methane just not the the tar that we were that we were looking for um so um and I just wanted to point out too that um my uh Partners at the stand Spanish fish Indians um actually named this par seat so this will be the name of the tar seep and in the literature moving forward M waum um and it means a place where it seeps through um I thought this might be helpful because when when my colleague said this is a methane cold seep I was like really what's that um I mean I'd heard of them so cold seeps I just kind of pulled this from a a couple areas across the web I have a image here a kind of a a um an Illustrated image of um a methane uh a cold seat essentially which shows um clams muscles and tube worms um on the left side of the image on the right side um some methane gas bub that are kind of popping up um the the purple area near the the um gas bubbles uh indicate the bacteria that is typically there that eats eats the methane um so cold sea are places throughout the global ocean where chemicals like hydrogen sulfide methane and other hydrocarbon RC fluids and our gases escape from cracks or fissures in the ocean floor these are typically deep um if you want to find out more about them you can go to no Oar deep um ocean education project there's the URL for it there um https hyphen deepocean education.org um so the cool thing about um cold seeps are that they provide essential habitats for different kinds of species um uh lots of different food kind of really there's like a whole um system kind of a whole ecosystem surrounding these um they're recognized as essential breeding grounds and nurseries for some types of species and help maintain species populations and ensure reproductive success um and in terms of management of Natural Resources Discovery and mapping of ocean seeds is essential for understanding and managing renewable energy resources like hydrocarbon and gas hydrate reservoirs and in terms of the carbon cycle cold seeps play a crucial role in moving older carbon stored in the seafloor onto the ocean where it's consumed by bacteria and other microbes um and locating and studying these seeps um expand our understanding of how seeps impact Oceanic and possibly atmospheric processes um so while we're not going to be doing much more uh research on the cold seep ourselves again as an archaeologist and geologists uh we do have biological Partners now who are super excited about this cold seep um and uh moving forward there's going to be some I'm sure interesting research kind of coming out of this but it wasn't known that this was there so this is it was a pretty exciting find again you know one of the things that I really love about this kind of research is that it is super interdisciplinary and you never necessarily know exactly what you're going to find um but you know in thinking about this from a kind of a cultural perspective um the diversity of carbonate structures that were out there so these are the these are the carbonate structures and these are basically created by the bacteria that you can mat species that eat the bacterial mats um they really range from low to high relief structures um and so with the higher rates of sedimentation on the Continental shelves these cold seeps may have been active for centuries or longer so that gets my brain thinking about did this have any sort of um impact to people that were living around these areas and living on the islands um you know thousands of years ago and did that impact kind of the way that they thought about the islands way that they thought about the um the resources around the island so we'll certainly be thinking about that a little bit more but a lot of the research that is going to be coming from this will be from our our biological colleagues um and one thing I wanted to mention too is that part of this project um and our some of the partners on the project were some members from the shash community um they were out there on the boats with us um on uh and particularly when we found the cold seep which was which was really great um we I wanted just to kind of recognize certainly the shimes working um working group shash Community working group that works with the Noah U Marine Sanctuary they were very helpful uh particularly AA pagaling came out with us um and kind of thinking through um different kinds of um indigenous thought surrounding the submerged landscape and cultural landscapes in general um and then also um Andrew Mendoza um who's works with s is banesh Indians was out there with us for our our big cold seat fine our our big uh few weeks um on on the the Sal ride um and you know in thinking about incorporating indigenous knowledge and thinking about you know science I mean Native Americans really the first scientists I think a lot of people think about science being separate from indigenous knowledge which is always kind of odd to me um and so really kind of having um folks that hold that knowledge on the team and really thinking about kind of collectively how you think about these Landscapes um there was really no replacement for being able to be on the ships being on the land being in that space um 3:00 in the morning really tired looking out at this like beautiful night sky and kind of thinking what that space looked like you know 10,000 years ago 13,000 years ago um I think that you know there was really no replacement for that and kind of really um being able to be lucky to be able to share um in that knowledge um and to be able to be a recipient of some of that that knowledge that was shared by indigenous

2024-02-22 10:33

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