Hidden beneath concrete at San Pedro High School, construction workers found a buried secret — thousands of marine fossils echoing Palos Verdes Peninsula’s ancient geological past.

Researchers uncovered two distinct sites on campus where new buildings were under construction: a bone bed dating back 8.7 million years in the Miocene era and a shell bed about 120,000 years old from the Pleistocene era.

With construction of the buildings now completed, scientists are focusing on learning what they can from the fossils that date back several million years.

“There’s never been this type of density of fossils ever found at a site like this before in California,” said Wayne Bischoff, the director of cultural resources at Envicom Corp., who managed the collection of the fossils that were excavated. “It’s the largest marine bone bed found in Los Angeles and Orange counties.”

Bischoff said the marine fossils align with what researchers already knew: that for most of Los Angeles’s geological history, the land has been underwater.

“We’re kind of like detectives,” said Richard Behl, a geologist at Long Beach State.

Behl is testing the chemical and mineral composition of the fossil blocks, hoping scientists can learn more about these prehistoric environments including the atmosphere and the conditions that enabled animal remains to fossilize. “We got to find clues and piece those clues together.”

The fossils dating to the Miocene were encased in a type of fossilized algae called diatomite. Behl said the diatomite tells him that the area was nutrient rich with algae that supported a complex ecosystem including dolphins, fish and whales that crowded the area for food. Alongside the marine animals, Bischoff said he was excited to find an entire shore ecology that included skulls of sandpipers and pieces of driftwood in the bone bed.

“Once we started realizing that we had a mix of shore material … I started thinking that there may have been an extinct island off the coast,” Bischoff said.

The fossilized mandible of a sabretooth salmon is among the items found under the school.

(Wayne Bischoff / Envicom Corp.)

Bischoff hypothesized that during the Miocene era, a heavy storm washed plant and animal debris down from a prehistoric island into a submarine canyon before mud sealed the organic materials into a layer of sediment. Tectonic activity and receding ocean waters revealed those fossils after millions of years.

“After their experience on this site, [scientists] have started looking for other extinct islands,” Bischoff said. “It looks like there was a lot of islands that would form and then dissipate in the Channel Island zone.”

On campus, the construction of new buildings has beencompleted and 80% of the fossil blocks found in 2022 have been passed on to research and educational institutions, Bischoff said. Those fossils are now split among the Los Angeles Unified School District, the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, Cal State Channel Islands and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

This summer, Austin Hendy, an assistant curator at the Natural History Museum who specializes in invertebrate paleontology, spent hours sifting and sorting through thousands of fossilized shells found in the shell bed.

Students from Betty Placensia Elementary School in Los Angeles tour the L.A. Underwater section at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

(Michelle Jimenez)

Advertisement

The discovery has inspired at least one high school student to study the past as a way to understand the present.

“It was sort of like gold panning,” said Milad Esfahani, a San Pedro High student, who helped Hendy sort the fossils by size. “I would be tasked with looking for tiny, microscopic fossils like an 8th to 16th of an inch in size.”

It was the first time that Milad, a 17 year-old senior, had held a 125,000-year-old fossil and now he hopes to study marine paleontology at a university as he applies to colleges this fall.

The Natural History Museum hasn’t announced plans to display the fossils found under the school but already has a marine paleontology section on display called L.A. Underwater.

Hendy hopes that next summer he can work with another student to develop a display at San Pedro High School as part of the efforts to educate and engage the public on L.A.’s prehistoric past.

“Discovery can continue to happen — these blocks, they erode very slowly,” Hendy said of the fossil blocks extracted from the school. “We hope that the students and the public will be able to sort of clamber over these rocks in the years to come and be inspired by what they find.”

Although the work can be laborious and may seem pedantic to others, scientists such as Behl are drawn to this work because it reveals how our present is still being shaped by the Earth’s 4.54-billion-year history.

The discovery includes the fossils of hundreds of small fish vertebrae.

(Austin Hendy / Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County )

“It’s a real window into what the geography of the oceans and land were at the time when this occurred,” Behl said. “Even though that seems a long time ago, that has real impact upon everything we got today.”

In fact, many Angelenos rely on fossils to run everyday errands — they fuel our gas tanks.

“Those diatoms in that diatomite is what gives rise to the oil in Los Angeles” and the automobile and aeronautical industries, Hendy said. “The city owes its history to geology.”

Summer campers learn to sort fossils from San Pedro.

(Austin Hendy / Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County)

Aging infrastructure, short-term thinking, and ambitions that far outstrip its funding are just a few of the problems threatening the future of America’s vaunted civil space agency, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

In a report commissioned by Congress and released this week, experts said that a number of the agency’s technological resources are suffering, including the Deep Space Network — an international collection of giant radio antennas that is overseen by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.

Report authors warned that NASA has, for too long, prioritized near-term missions at the cost of long-term investments in its infrastructure, workforce and technology.

“The inevitable consequence of such a strategy is to erode those essential capabilities that led to the organization’s greatness in the first place and that underpin its future potential,” the report said.

The choice facing the agency is stark, lead author Norman Augustine said Tuesday: Either the U.S. must increase funding for NASA, or the agency must cut some missions.

“For NASA, this is not a time for business as usual,” said Augustine, a former executive at Lockheed Martin. “The concerns it faces are ones that have built up over decades.”

Even as society at large has become exponentially more reliant on technology in the 60 years since NASA’s founding, federal investment in research and development has declined significantly over the decades, the study said.

This has been felt acutely at NASA, whose funding from Congress, adjusted for inflation, has plummeted from its Apollo-era high and remained essentially flat for decades.

NASA’s budget for years has hovered around 0.1% of total U.S. gross domestic product — less than one-eighth of its allowance during the mid-1960s.

Within the space agency, the report noted, science and technology funding has remained at a constant percentage within the budget even as missions have become far more costly and complicated.

As a result, NASA centers have only “low- to moderate-level efforts” underway to study emerging technologies that in a previous era might have been pioneered at the agency.

“NASA is a strong organization today, but it has underfunded the future NASA,” Augustine said.

The centers include JPL, where the report committee interviewed staffers at all levels of the organization.

JPL referred requests for comment to NASA.

“This report aligns with our current efforts to ensure we have the infrastructure, workforce, and technology that NASA needs for the decades ahead,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement provided by the agency. “We will continue to work diligently to address the committee’s recommendations — and drive our cutting-edge work on Earth, in the skies, and in the stars.”

Another key problem the report identified is neglect of NASA’s facilities, 83% of which have exceeded their designed life span. Attempts to repair and improve the agency’s infrastructure are stifled by a rule requiring a lengthy and labor-intensive review process for all requests over $1 million, a figure that has not changed since the rule’s inception despite a 30% increase in costs from inflation.

Employees at JPL in particular voiced concerns about this restriction, the report noted.

As a key example of a facility whose funding has failed to keep up with its increasing demands, the report highlighted the Deep Space Network, which makes up the world’s largest scientific telecommunications system.

JPL manages the network’s three terrestrial sites in Goldstone, Calif.; Canberra, Australia; and Madrid. The network’s budget has declined from $250 million in 2010 to roughly $200 million today, even as demands on it have increased.

As a result, the overburdened network has been forced to make costly compromises. During the Artemis I mission in late 2022, the lunar mission elbowed out all other scientific uses of the network, costing more than $21 million in data transmission from the James Webb Space Telescope alone.

The situation on the ground is not much better, the report noted. Basic infrastructure such as roads and pipes are failing at the sites, and their workforce is spread dangerously thin. Necessary maintenance and hiring would cost an estimated $45 million per year for the next 10 years, the authors wrote.

“This report is a wake-up call for NASA and political leaders,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Planetary Society. “It identifies critical systemic issues that are already threatening NASA’s ability to pursue its ambitious program in exploration and science, issues that have been felt but not quantified until now. We have a 20th century infrastructure for a 21st century space program.”

Peter Neff understands the allure of the world’s fifth-largest continent.

The camera roll on his phone is brimming with videos and photos of his trips to Antarctica, where the glaciologist and climate scientist has spent days and weeks at a time collecting ice core samples. His work helps develop a record of past climate conditions and anticipate what’s to come.

When the pandemic lockdowns started to keep everyone at home, Neff, a professor at the University of Minnesota, upped his social media presence by posting explanations of his work online under the username “Icy Pete.” He reposted a video to TikTok that had done well on X, which captures the sound a chunk of ice makes when it falls 90 meters down a borehole (“Pew!” Just like the sound of a gunshot in a cartoon). It was an immediate success, garnering more than 30,000 views.

A view of the sloping iceberg in Antarctica in February. Scientists like glaciologist Peter Neff are focusing on mapping changes in Antarctica’s glaciers and ice sheets.

(Sebnem Coskun / Anadolu / Getty Images)

Advertisement

In 2024 (and 2022), Neff was featured as a Climate Creator to Watch, a collaboration between startup media Pique Action and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and his posts had gained more than 4 million likes.

“As a scientist, my job is to tell folks what the situation is and what we could choose to do to not make it worse, or to make it better,” Neff said in an interview. “I hope I can provide information that is accurately used to describe the challenges that we face, because it is quite serious.”

As the internet accommodates a growing range of voices, scientists studying climate and the environment have taken to sharing their work online, translating obscure topics and discoveries into accessible bits of information. Instead of waiting years for their studies and work to be published in academic journals, scientists like Neff have used social media to extend their reach — and their brand.

Joe Hanson, the biologist who hosts PBS’ “Be Smart” series, is a well-known voice on climate issues on YouTube. One 44-second video explaining the Keeling curve (a daily record of global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration) has 2.4 million views. His 28-minute video tackling climate change myths has been viewed more than 900,000 times. Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe has an authoritative presence on Instagram and partners with influencers to spread the gospel of climate science. Peter Kalmus took the internet by storm in 2022 when he and other scientists chained himself to the door of the J.P. Morgan Chase office building in downtown Los Angeles to protest the company’s fossil fuel investments and were subsequently arrested. On X, his “ClimateHuman” account has more than 330,000 followers.

The potential to attract likes is enormous. According to the Pew Research Center, one survey found about half of U.S. adults said they reported seeing news at least “sometimes” while using social media platforms.

Neff has studied glaciology for 15 years and has traveled several times to the Antarctic region to study ice cores — cylinders of drilled ice that serve as records of past climate change and are extracted from ice sheets and glaciers. Among his many titles, he is the director of field research and data for the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration.

Katharine Hayhoe at the COP27 U.N. Climate Summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in 2022. Hayhoe has an authoritative presence on Instagram and partners with influencers to share climate science.

(Nariman El-Mofty / Associated Press)

On TikTok, Neff explains the process of “how to go from old air in ice to an air sample” in 60 seconds. While an academic journal entry might take on more scientific terms and explanations, Neff breaks down the process of his work with ice cores in layman’s terms, rushing through the narration — “drill your ice core borehole,” “load ice in the vacuum chamber,” “melt that ice” — in a matter-of-fact voice for a video that has more than 617,000 views as of this writing.

Neff’s TikTok account had 224,000 followers, and a graduate student and fellow Antarctica scientist, Austin Carter, who also posts about their work through the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration, has eclipsed him with nearly 254,000 followers.

According to a study published in January by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a British nonprofit that monitors online hate speech, climate denialism has shifted from denying global warming is happening to claiming climate solutions won’t work and that the climate movement is unreliable across all platforms. (The study, which reviewed about 12,000 videos using artificial intelligence, also found that YouTube makes up to $13.4 million “from channels posting denial.”)

Neff has some unkind words for climate deniers. At one point, he deleted a video that showed sun halos in Antarctica because it had gone viral among “flat Earthers” who were trying to use the video as proof that the world is not, in fact, round.

“These people are brick walls … and you’re not going to change anybody’s mind,” he said. “You don’t know what people are going to do with your content once you post it.”

The climatologist stresses the role scientists can play in spreading fact-based information.

“I’m trying to just educate people … especially with all of our work being publicly funded,” Neff said. “We’re obligated to share about it.”

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist, took a different path to social media stardom. As the former executive director of the La Jolla-based Waitt Institute, which implements sustainable ocean plans and policy, she led communication efforts to make sure Barbudan fishing communities had input in proposing policy. She began running Facebook pages for the effort, and found she had a knack for communicating her work to the public. Next, she began blogging for National Geographic and writing freelance stories.

Marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson speaks onstage during a NYC Climate Strike rally and demonstration at Battery Park in 2019.

(Ron Adar / SOPA Images/Sipa USA /Associated Press)

“To me, all of climate, environmental communication is about how can we repeat each other’s successes and avoid others’ failures,” said Johnson, who has studied marine biology for about 12 years. “So that requires getting in the weeds a little and hopefully, in a way that’s appealing and welcoming as opposed to like, boring and insufferable.”

Johnson has acquired her expertise through many endeavors. She’s the Roux Distinguished Scholar at Bowdoin College, a co-founder of the think tank Urban Ocean Lab and the All We Can Save Project, both of which promote sustainable marine and climate solutions. This month, Johnson will release her book “What if We Get it Right?” which features conversations with farmers, climate activists and financiers — among others — in an effort to map out possible climate futures. In addition, she appears in several publications and platforms in an effort to convince the general public that there is still hope in avoiding climate catastrophe.

On TikTok, where she does not have an account, a snippet from one of her Ted Talks with five facts about parrotfish has more than 400,000 views. Johnson is often featured on podcasts as a guest to talk about ocean conservation, and followers share her climate action Venn diagram to inspire action and defeat hopelessness.

She gained a big chunk of her followers in 2020, after the Washington Post published her op-ed that tackled climate policy and racism. The content she posts under her name is personal and conversational (she has more than 120,000 followers on Instagram) but the organizations that she runs stick to policy-driven posts.

Conversations among members of the public, scientists and policymakers are all part of working toward a climate solution, Johnson said. “That is really at the heart of the way I attempt to share information, is not by me being out there just like screaming into the void as one person but by trying to make this a collective conversation.”

For now, Johnson said she will continue her “begrudging” relationship with social media and continue to be a voice that people can rely on when it comes to climate policy ahead of the November presidential election, and even local races, which have a direct impact on voters.

“There’s an intense amnesia in the United States about the Trump administration, and how awful that was for the environment,” she said, citing the hundreds of environmental regulations on clean air and water that he rolled back. “I just really want to do my little part in helping people understand how to be a climate voter. The people who follow me care about this issue, but it’s really hard to get good information from a person that you trust.”