The answer is YES! like never before. But what is this froth, anyway?
Sea foam is primarily created by tiny skeletons of a kind of phytoplankton called diatoms, and it is harmless. It fact, it smells and feels benign.
Bill Hanshumaker, public information officer of Oregon State’s Hatfield Marine Science Center, says the “suds” begin with the breakdown of the skeletons of tiny single-celled plants. When high wind and waves churn air into the water, their dissolved organic matter helps to create bubbles.
“Like a bathtub full of bubbles, sea foam needs two ingredients,” explains Dr. Elizabeth L. Venrick, a marine ecologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. “Something to [decrease] the surface tension of the water, like bubble bath, and something to froth it up, like water running into the tub.”
Ever since wild storms pounded the California coast in January, our shorelines have been full of it!
Witness this stretch of beach in Pescadero ~ image right.
Note: In researching for this post, I can across the non plus ultra of sea foam, photographed in August, 2007 by the Australian press on the shore at Yamba, New South Wales.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow – if all the storminess in SC only produced that moderate an amount of foam on the beach, must have taken a tempest of biblical proportions to generate that avalanche in Australia!
Looks inviting, doesn’t it?