For centuries, Big Sur residents have seen Dark Watchers in the mountains
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If you want to see a Dark Watcher, you should wait until the late afternoon.
As the sun begins its descent behind the waves, look to the sharp ridges of the Santa Lucia Range, the mountains that rise up from the shores of Monterey and down the Central California coast. If you are lucky, you might see figures silhouetted against them. Some say the watchers are 10 feet tall, made taller or wider by hats or capes. They may turn to look at you. But they always move away quickly and disappear.
For centuries, Big Sur residents have seen Dark Watchers in the mountains
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An ROV Is Making Incredibly Detailed Maps of the Seafloor Off California
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Image: © 2013 MBARI
About 20 miles (32 kilometers) off the Californian coast, the 10,500-pound (4,7630-kilogram) remote submersible Doc Ricketts swept its strobe lights and sonar pulses across the seafloor like a transient silent disco. The vehicle wasn’t just putting on a show for the deep-sea denizens of the Pacific. It was mapping the terrain and ecology of a unique geological formation some 2,600 feet (793 meters) beneath the ocean’s surface.
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Doc Ricketts was the tool by which a human team from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute scoured the seafloor, assessing its bathymetry and rich ecology.
“Our goal is to map benthic habitats at centimeter scale in complex terrain, in the deep ocean, efficiently,” said Dave Caress, a principal engineer for MBARI and the leader of the seafloor mapping team, in an email. “We can currently cover an area around [110 yards by 165 yards or 100 meters by 150 meters] in a single 10-hour ROV dive. In order to ach