Pacific Ocean
The Pacific Ocean lies to the west of California. Sea temperatures rarely exceed 65 °F (18 °C), even in summer, because of up-welling deep waters with dissolved nutrients. Therefore, most sea life in and around California more closely resembles Arctic, rather than tropical, biotopes. The sea off California is remarkably fertile, a murky green filled with fish, rather than the clear dead blue of most tropical seas. Before 1930, there was an extremely valuable sardine (herring) fishery off Monterey, but this was depleted, an event later famous as the background to John Steinbeck's Cannery Row.
Read more about this topic: Geography Of California
Famous quotes containing the words pacific and/or ocean:
“The doctor of Geneva stamped the sand
That lay impounding the Pacific swell,
Patted his stove-pipe hat and tugged his shawl.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences. Serpents, bears, hyenas, tigers rapidly vanish as civilization advances, but the most populous and civilized city cannot scare a shark far from its wharves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)