National Marine Sanctuary

Now, the second case is closer to the US, actually in the US, in California.

And so this is the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary off California's Central Coast.

So the critical difference here is where the idea came from.

So before the Marine Park had already been put in, like the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park had already been established for a number of years, and this was part of their ongoing feedback and using science and feedback and public support to do that.

And that final comment window alone drew more than 98,000 submissions of people putting comments, with independent analysis finding over 99% in support of the protected area.

So the sanctuary was formally designated in November 2024.

It's the first tribally nominated National Marine Sanctuary in the country.

That's huge.

So it shows how needed the charts were, how bad the weather could be, how unexpectedly it could change.

Right, and the, the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries is another program office within the National Ocean Service.

Exactly.

Right.

Uh, you know, so there are, there are other examples of that.

But I think most of those core missions of the early Coast Survey still, uh, live within the, uh, the National Ocean Service.

The N- National Marine Sanctuaries, which I know around 1972 is when Congress enacted the National Marine Sanctuaries Act, uh, which led to the first national marine sanctuary, which is the USS Monitor.

Exactly, yeah.

And so we did things like this.

We expanded the Flower Garden Bank's National Marine Sanctuary.

We established the first National Marine Sanctuary, a new one, at Mallows Bay on the Potomac River in 20 years.

We also put in some really important missions to save coral reefs in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

I love the development of a NOAA strategy to respond to stony coral tissue loss disease that's affecting coral reefs.

And then we actually put together a whole national strategy to map and explore the U.S. EEZ We did some great work on invasive species, combating them like lionfish in the Southeast and so on.

And how I did that with the various really interesting environmental science programs at NOAA is what that whole second part's about, which I love to dive into.

In fact, literally, I'm a scuba diver and my wife is a Navy diver.