Engineers and prisoners alike risked life and limb as they built the two-lane highway into the majestic coastal cliffs of the Santa Lucia mountains. The 18-year project eventually connected San Luis Obispo to Carmel via the seaside, where the geology makes the road inherently susceptible to landslides. The 1937 grand opening even included a symbolic blasting of a boulder, which the governor cleared from the road with a bulldozer. It was the first of many to come.

Now, incessant storms are causing landslide trouble on Highway 1. Again.

Multiple problems

A 45-mile section of Highway 1 extending from Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn in Monterey County to Ragged Point in San Obispo County is currently closed due to landslides, with no estimate on when it will reopen. And residents, businesses and Caltrans crews along the Big Sur coast are bracing for more geological activity as winter storms continue rolling in.

Closures like this along the Big Sur coast are not uncommon. Residents and businesses aren’t surprised when they are temporarily cut off from the world. Caltrans engineers know they must move mountains off the road. Repeatedly.

But nobody gives up on California’s crown jewel highway, which is recognized by the U.S. Department of Transportation as a National Scenic Byway. Laborers, who seem to be working continuously to repair damage and rebuild sections after landslides, are lauded as heroes, and locals host celebrations for reopenings.

‘Challenges and rewards’

“A ribbon of highway on the edge of the continent presents challenges — and rewards,” said Kevin Drabinski, the Caltrans District 5 public information officer.

“We make these closures for the safety of the traveling public. It’s an international travel destination, and, just as important, it’s home to communities and businesses. So we try and do the best we can to keep it open,” he said.

Landslides come with the geology of the area. “It’s old ocean floor stuff that makes up a lot of the California coast that’s been accreted or pushed up on the continent, so it’s been faulted and folded and distorted and weakened,” said Gary Griggs, a professor of Earth Sciences at UC Santa Cruz.

Landslides on Highway 1 usually happen during storms, when water hits soil, making the soil heavy, lubricated and more fluid. Gravity sends chunks of mobilized mountainside plunging from steep, sweeping cliffsides into the crashing waves below — or onto the highway.

Caltrans prepares for winter storms in the fall. Crews inspect and clean out culverts, which Drabinski describes as the “unsung heroes of Highway 1.” Some workers even rappel from the cliffs with picks and other tools in hand to dislodge loose rocks. Worker safety is always a priority.

The goal is to make the cliffs as stable as possible going into the winter. “We put special focus on areas that are downslope of the Dolan fire burn scar,” said Drabinski. Previously burned areas are especially prone to slides when the rains start.

The precarious road has been closed due to landslides dozens of times since it first opened in 1937. The road closed 55 times between 1937 and 2001, according to a 2001 report.

The worst event in that period was a 963-foot-high landslide in 1983 near Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park. The New York Times reported that it took 13 months, 30 bulldozers, 7,700 pounds of explosives, and $7.8 million to clear it, and one bulldozer operator lost his life in the process. When it reopened, residents threw a party with bands, balloons and a 52-foot-long carrot cake, according to the New York Times.

More recent winters have produced some of the worst — and most costly — landslides in the road’s history. Each time, Caltrans has been prepared and quick to respond.

In February 2017 a landslide displaced a damaged column of the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge. Crews demolished and completely replaced the bridge with a new $21.7 million bridge designed to reduce its susceptibility to landslides. The new bridge was completed in October 2017 after an effort to design and construct a new bridge quickly that Jim Shivers, a Caltrans spokesperson, described in a 2017 article as ”remarkable.”

But the road remained closed to the south — in May that same year, a landslide had buried the highway near Mud Creek, just north of the Big Sur Lookout. The massive event, described in the national news by Executive Director of the Big Sur Chamber of Commerce Stan Russell, as “the mother of all landslides,” buried a quarter-mile section of the highway 40 feet deep. The road reopened 14 months — and $54 million — later.

In January 2021, the road itself collapsed into the sea leaving a steep and terrifying void where the mountainside used to be. But Caltrans took advantage of subsequent dry weather and restored the road faster than anticipated. It reopened in April 2021, nearly two months ahead of schedule and only three months after the initial event.

The repeated cycle of damage and repair seems tedious, but there aren’t many other options for a coastal highway built into the mountainside.

“I think it’s always going to be this Band-Aid approach,” said Griggs. “We fix it up and wait for the next one, but it’s a place where that’s the only choice.”

“We do put a lot of resources into maintaining Highway 1 on the Big Sur coast,” said Drabinski. “It’s prompted out of service to the residents and businesses of the Big Sur community and to the travelers who return there because of its natural wonder.”

Normally response crews can approach Paul’s Slide, one of the current trouble spots, from the south. “When the highway is open, we just shoot up from Cambria, go right up the road past Ragged Point and deliver the goods,” he said. But with the southern closure, everything has to detour and enter from the north.

Drabinski said it’s “certainly likely” that conditions will worsen if the rains continue.

Caltrans said in the press release that they “will continue to take advantage of any break in inclement weather to assess road conditions and provide access as long as the conditions are favorable for public travel.”

When Highway 1 does open again, “the best way to view the scenic wonders of the Monterey coast is to park one’s car frequently and to enjoy the views at leisure,” according to a 1937 article in the Monterey Peninsula Herald. “Fortunately the great slides that have taken place during construction have resulted in scores of wide parking spaces, nearly all of them at points where the vistas are the most remarkable.”

The divers needed to ensure that the urchins were dead, but they didn’t have time to waste. Their goal was to kill hundreds of urchins apiece before the hourlong dive was over.

“Urchin culling” is an intervention — not a massacre. The intervention is necessary because the urchins are devouring the kelp, which Rootsaert describes as the marine equivalent of California’s redwood forests.

“If the redwood forests were on fire, people would be working tirelessly to save them,” Rootsaert said. “The kelp forests need saving, but because they are out of sight in the ocean it’s harder to get people to care.”

Rootsaert, a 57-year-old building systems engineer who lives in Monterey, founded the nonprofit Giant Giant Kelp Restoration Project in April 2021. Since then, he has taken more than 150 volunteers on more than 1,200 dives to cull more than 563,000 urchins.

Urchins are not an invasive species. The native creatures normally hide in crevices on the ocean floor and eat kelp that drifts down from the forest’s canopy. But a perfect storm of events beginning a decade ago threw the coastal marine ecosystem out of whack.

In 2013, a mysterious wasting disease wiped out the sunflower sea star, a voracious urchin predator with up to 24 limbs. From 2014 to 2016, the kelp forests languished through a persistent Pacific marine heat wave known as “The Blob.” Much of the kelp couldn’t take the heat. And without predators to keep them in check, the hungry urchins stormed out from their nooks and crannies and decimated the remaining kelp.

The event ravaged Pacific kelp forests from Mexico to Alaska. California’s North Coast lost 95% of its bull kelp forest. The Central Coast lost two-thirds of its giant kelp forest.

The Monterey Bay’s kelp forests used to support more than 1,000 marine species, including fish, snails, crabs and charismatic sea otters. But many of those species moved on when the urchins moved in.

Marine biologists call the desolate, urchin-filled areas “urchin barrens.”

“It’s like a moonscape where there once was a lush forest,” said Schwartz, 59, an Oakland resident who works in electronic security.

Rootsaert founded his kelp restoration project in the hopes of restoring the ecological balance.

Divers cull the urchins at a 100-meter square test site called Tanker’s Reef. A nearby site is left untouched so that scientists can compare results.

The experiment is a collaboration with environmental groups like Reef Check, which monitors the health of kelp forests along the West Coast, and government agencies such as the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.

Rootsaert’s group relies wholly on volunteer scuba divers. “Volunteers are the best answer,” Rootsaert said. “You are building an effort that will sustain itself over time because you have people acting as ocean stewards.”

Volunteer Paul Souza, a 40-year-old licensed therapist from Fresno, started diving in Monterey Bay as a teenager in the late ’90s, which he describes as “the days of the infamous kelp crawl, where the kelp was so thick you’d have to crawl over it.” But when he returned in 2020, the kelp was gone and the urchins were in charge.

The divers say if the kelp forests go, so does the magic and diversity of the ocean. In addition, Rootsaert said, the local dive tourism, fishing and abalone farming industries would suffer.

Fish use kelp for spawning and protection from predators. Abalone eat it.

Rootsaert noted that kelp also protects shorelines by absorbing energy from big waves, in addition to absorbing 20 times more carbon dioxide than trees through photosynthesis. And all that carbon ends up on the ocean floor — as opposed to the atmosphere — as the kelp sinks to the bottom when it dies. So saving the kelp forests helps in the war against global warming.

“We’re fighting climate change with a hammer,” Rootsaert quipped.

Over the summer, Reef Check conducted surveys at the test site and reported exciting results: The urchin count is down, and the kelp count is up.

“I’ll be honest. I was skeptical,” said Dan Abbott, director of Reef Check’s kelp forest program. “But now we have really good evidence” of the project’s success.

The volunteer divers say they’re seeing the return of dozens of species. “Señoritas, rainbow perch and blue rockfish follow us around, waiting for us to smash an urchin so they can get a free meal,” Schwartz said.

Monterey Bay’s sea otters won’t touch urchins in the now desolate areas of the seafloor because they’re starving and devoid of nutritional value. But otters do eat urchins living near healthy kelp, acting as gardeners of sorts. And some otters have recently been observed foraging within the bounds of the test site where kelp has returned.

But the initial data from the test site is giving some scientists hope that it’s possible to clear enough urchins in key areas for kelp to get established. Once those patches of kelp forest are healthy, scientists say, the ecosystem has a better chance of restoring its balance.

Diver Gen Rohe, a 37-year-old marketing manager for an environmental nonprofit in San Francisco, sees the project as an opportunity for divers to help save the underwater world they love.

“We hear so much bad news about the environment,” she said. “With forest fires and climate change and all of these devastating stories, this project is a hopeful story. It’s gratifying to see our efforts pay off and witness the rebound of this beautiful ecosystem.”

Fun urchin facts

• Sea urchins on the Pacific Ocean floor are the prey of otters and sea stars. But humans also eat them — their gonads to be exact — as a world-class sushi delicacy called uni.
• An urchin’s mouth is on its bottom side. Called “Aristotle’s lantern,”  it holds five teeth for chewing kelp.
• Urchins use special appendages called tube feet to snag blades of kelp, which they wrap around to their undersides and shove into their mouths. They also use the tube feet to walk and breathe.
• Urchins are nocturnal. They’re on the move at night to find food.
• Starving urchins can live for years without eating.

Source:  Monterey Bay Aquarium, Oceana

For more information about the Giant Giant Kelp Restoration Project, visit www.g2kr.com.

The new facility on UCSC’s Science Hill houses a cryo-electron microscope — a tool that revolutionized the field of structural biology over the past decade. It allows researchers to visualize proteins by taking pictures of them. While similar instruments do exist within the Bay Area’s thriving pharmaceutical and biotech industries, UCSC’s Glacios microscope is one of fewer than 200 in the world. The facility is designed as a one-stop-shop that anyone can use, which makes the technology accessible to both local and international researchers and biotech businesses.

“It’s really impressive,” says Rose Marie Haynes, a microscopist at the Pacific Northwest Cryo-EM Center, the national center in Portland. “I don’t know of anywhere else that’s quite as streamlined. It’s definitely a valuable resource for anyone who’s getting into the field.”

Proteins are in your skin, blood, bones and every other tissue in your body. They run your internal clock, help you to heal, move your muscles, and enable every one of your senses. And they’re very, very small. For reference, the diameter of a human hair is around 100,000 nanometers. The diameter of a single protein is around 5 nanometers.

Structural biologists study the shapes of proteins. “If we want to understand biology, which means life, … it’s important to know how your protein looks,” says Vitor Hugo Balasco Serrão, the research specialist at UCSC’s new facility.

The shape determines the function. Proteins that have the wrong shape can cause diseases, like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. And most drugs are based on protein shapes. Want to turn an overactive protein off? Find a compound that can stick to a crevice in that protein’s shape; it’s like jamming a stick into a bicycle wheel. But to study the structures of proteins, scientists have to be able to look at them.

Enter: the cryo-electron microscope. As its name implies, the technique is cold. Researchers place a tiny drop of water that contains the protein onto a small metal grid 3 millimeters in diameter. They plunge that grid into icy (-300 °F) liquid ethane so fast that the water flash freezes into a glassy form of ice, then shoot a beam of electrons through it. The electrons work just like rays of light through a camera lens; they create a 2D picture.

Powerful computers take thousands of 2D pictures and assemble them into a 3D model of the protein. That 3D model, which scientists refer to as a solved structure, can be used to design drugs, or learn about diseases. Remember that image of the coronavirus spike protein — the one that was in every article about COVID-19 for the past two years? That image was generated using cryo-EM. And it was a major reason researchers were able to design treatments and vaccines so rapidly.

Cryo-EM is much faster and more automated than traditional techniques, like X-ray crystallography. Melissa Jurica, a structural biologist at UCSC, says it speeds things up for researchers. “Instead of growing crystals, which would take weeks to months, now they get a sample and they can put it in the microscope and collect their data within a week and that is amazing,” she explained.

In 2017, Jurica led the charge to secure an instrumentation grant to pay for the $1.8 million microscope. Obstacles — including a room remodel, a lack of data processing infrastructure and the COVID-19 pandemic — delayed the grand opening. But Jurica worked hard to get the facility up and running, and researchers started collecting data in March 2022. Serrão said the final cost of the facility including building renovations and computing resources was close to $4 million.

The grant paid for the microscope, but to keep it running, they needed a business plan. Serrão had ideas, and the timing was perfect. “We just got super lucky [Serrão] was looking for a job at the time,” said Jurica. “He’s going to be the reason our facility succeeds.”

At nearly 8 feet tall, the scope takes up serious space. It clicks and wheezes as Serrão loads samples from researchers in Brazil. This is part of his business plan — anyone can use the scope, but they’re charged for the time. UCSC has some grant money available to help university researchers with the costs, and internal users get a discount, but everyone pays.

The UCSC facility is designed for doing the initial dirty work and optimizing the process. “Our facility is for sample preparation, optimization and screening,” says Serrão. Researchers can perfect important parameters, like ice thickness, sample concentration and grid conditions. They can get a decently high-resolution structure on the Glacios.

If they need even higher resolution, they can send their optimized grids to one of three NIH-funded national centers, located in Stanford, Portland and New York City, which house more powerful scopes. “Some people don’t need to go to another institution to polish off their data, some people do,” says Jurica. Time on the national microscopes is free as long as the project is accepted, so doing the screening work at UCSC helps researchers to write strong proposals that are likely to be accepted.

Researchers who depend on the technique can now work at UCSC. “We were able to hire Sara Loerch, who needs electron microscopy for her research program,” says Jurica. And the facility is speeding up research for structural biologists that were already there. “Labs that were specializing in other techniques are now all kind of moving toward cryo-EM,” says Jurica.

The unique setup makes the technique accessible to newbies. “One of the things that makes cryo-EM challenging to approach is that it requires so many different fields of expertise to go through the full workflow,” said Haynes. “The sample prep requires a crazy amount of biochemical knowledge. And then, if you’re extremely well-versed in that, it’s a pretty big learning curve to figure out the actual grid optimization followed by the screening and data collection, the processing, these are all totally different sets of skills. So offering a facility that goes through that entire process like as a one-stop shop makes it actually an approachable thing rather than having to piecemeal all of that together.”

Since they started collecting data, UCSC researchers have already solved seven protein structures. This is impressive; with other techniques it could take years to solve a single structure.

Scientists are forging ahead to explore some of the world’s most pressing biological questions. 13 UCSC labs currently use the equipment to study Alzheimer’s disease, nanoparticles, viruses, cell cycles in cancer and more. Serrão also has users from three local biotech companies and universities from the East Coast, Canada and Brazil.

To anyone who needs to visualize something very small, Serrão says: “Come over here, visit the facility, become a user, push your PI to say ‘Let’s do cryo!’ It’s a matter of scheduling a meeting and seeing if your stuff can be imaged.” And to anyone considering a foray into structural biology, he says, “It’s the future. If you look at every single pharmaceutical company or biotech company in the Bay Area, every single one has an electron microscope and every single one is hiring. And the salaries are great.”

Structural biologists published the first paper to include data from the facility on Oct. 28. A second paper is currently being peer-reviewed.

Anyone interested in the facility can learn more at www.ucsccryoem.org.