Excerpt:
In anticipation of a live forum at the Pedro Point Firehouse in Pacifica California with Rosanna Xiaa, a Los Angeles Times environmental reporter and author of “California Against the Sea,” and coastal geology expert and professor Gary Griggs, held on Sunday, March 3, 2024, Tribune intern and Oceana High School student Tyler Paing, sat down with Griggs to explore the topic of coastal erosion for California and what it means for Pacifica…
Can you describe your involvement with the book, Rosanna Xiaa in her book, “California Against the Sea?”
Rosanna is a coastal reporter, but she reports on a lot of things. She had asked me some questions about different things, so I think she saw me as I guess a source of information. I knew she was doing a book and she had come up to Capitola maybe a year before. We met and walked along a stretch of shoreline with houses on the cliff, and the area was sort of flooded by high tide. So we sat there and talked. I gave her examples, but I didn’t really know until the book came out that she had a whole chapter on me in there, with my background and experience.
Can you describe your educational background and work experience?
My background includes biological sciences. I have an undergraduate degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara. And then I graduated with a Ph.D. in oceanography from Oregon State University, and I minored in geology and civil engineering. So I sort of came together in the coastal zone, because we have oceans and land and engineering, and I came to UC Santa Cruz — it’s my 56th year (in Santa Cruz County). So for a time, I worked on a lot of different things, teaching, writing, lecturing.
But over the last 30 or 40 years it’s mostly focused on the coastal zone. Things like coastal processes, hazards, engineering, and how we deal with coastal hazards like Pacifica has been dealing with. More recently, sea level rise and how we respond to it. Along with my academic background, I’ve also done a lot of coastal consulting, so real-world work with public agencies on various coastal hazards and issues and how to respond to those.
Image at top: Coastal Geologist. Oceanographer and University of California Santa Cruz professor Gary Griggs stands in the sand dunes along Monterey Bay © D Shrestha Ross.
