A stunning new view of Monterey Bay - Cover Story

Sunset, March, 1996 by Jeff Phillips

The famed aquarium offers a thrilling glimpse into the Pacific's secret depths. There's lots for visitors to do on and around the bay, too

The same folks who in 1984 gave the West a three-story-tall indoor kelp forest have found another way to immerse people in the wonders of the sea without getting them wet. If you're among the nearly 20 million visitors who have already experienced the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the design of the new Outer Bay exhibit, opening March 2, may come as something of a surprise. Where the cannery-retro informality of the main building combines with frequent bay views to suggest the exuberance of a stroll along the shore, the new exhibit has a more subdued, almost muffled ambience. It's a dramatic change in exhibit presentation, one intended to underscore the very different marine environment of the outer bay - an almost alien world that few people have ever experienced.

The opening of the aquarium's $57-million bayfront wing is the latest development in a sea swell of change surging around Monterey Bay itself. Once famous only for its seemingly inexhaustible fisheries, the bay now has 16 public, private, and educational marine-research organizations ringing its shore.

This increasing scientific attention, coupled with strong local environmental support, finally turned the political tide in favor of creating the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary in 1992. While the aquarium's new Outer Bay exhibit is reason enough to plan a trip to Monterey, you'll want at least a weekend here to allow time for late-season whale-watching on the sanctuary's waters and for exploring its rocky headlands and long, lonely beaches.

The amazing world of the outer bay

Most marine life in nearshore waters is oriented to the bay's relatively shallow seafloor, the sandy beaches or rocky tide-pools that edge its waters, or the dense thickets of kelp forming submarine forests in the bay. But Monterey Bay's outer waters have no such terrestrial landmarks or boundaries. Life in this open ocean basically falls into two simply defined "lifestyle" groups: muscular, streamlined swimmers built for speed and long-distance travel, and soft-bodied, mostly gelatinous drifters that go with the flow of the currents.

The aquarium's new exhibit concentrates on the dynamics of life in the outer bay's sunlit surface waters, about the top 300 feet. "This is a world without walls or comers, where nothing is fixed and there's no place to hide," says one exhibit designer. "We want visitors to feel like they're diving under the surface and getting immersed in this environment."

Visitors experience this sense of immersion as soon as they enter. Look up and 3,000 glittering anchovies circle above you in a 15,000-gallon roundabout - a display so simple, yet effective, that you catch your breath. Elsewhere, low ceilings, thick gray-blue carpeting, and dusky, deep blue light flooding from tanks on the walls enhance the feeling that you've entered the undersea world.

The exhibits in the first gallery introduce the distinctive lifestyles of swimmers and drifters. The tank in which sleek, silvery mackerel swim past the window in a seemingly endless stream is doughnut-shaped to allow plenty of tinning room. The counterpoint aquarium filled with hubcap-size purple-striped jellies is actually only 12 inches deep from front to back, but it has currents to help jellies "drift" vertically.

This antechamber opens into two larger galleries containing exhibits and tanks that explore the drifters' lives and times. Here special lighting and companion displays (you can't miss the 9-foot how-it-works model of a jelly) make the seemingly sedentary habits of gelatinous blobs strangely compelling. Another creative combination of live and static displays zeros in on the myriad tiny organisms called plankton that are the dietary mainstay of many ocean creatures, including whales.

The centerpiece of the Outer Bay exhibit is a single tank of swimmers that holds a million gallons of seawater, more than all of the aquarium's other exhibits combined. You view the 90- by 35- by 52-foot tank through the world's largest single-pane window. The expanse of nearly 13-inch-thick acrylic fills a 54- by 15-foot opening big enough for seven Peterbilt trucks to drive through side by side.

Why is the tank so big? In part because biologists believe it will take a habitat this large to keep the exhibit's eight species of open-ocean fish, sharks, turtles, and rays alive. In part because designers wanted to create the illusion of open ocean by having the tank's walls and bottom disappear, thanks to special lighting and 1.8 million glass tiles. And, in part, simply to astound.

Though some visitors may be more thrilled by the sharks or the huge, round ocean sunfish slowly cruising the tank, others will be mesmerized by the school of 80 big yellowfin tuna that flash and dart like synchronized swimmers. One moment they slash the surface, the next they fade into indigo shadows at the edges of the tank, only to reappear in a glittering stream of pale moonbeam silver as they school slowly back along the expanse of window.