Santa Barbara, Calif. — A scientist says he has discovered a tiny island submerged off the central California coast, more than 16,000 years after it slipped from view during the waning years of the last ice age.
The island, little more than a mile in length, lies 400 feet underwater about a dozen miles from shore.
Ed Keller, professor of geology and environmental studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, stands recently on a cliff overlooking the Santa Barbara Channel. Keller discovered a lost island, believed to have been submerged off the California coast 16,000 years ago, which now lies under 400 feet of water.
It poked no more than 30 feet above the waves during the late Pleistocene, when the continental-sized ice sheets that capped much of the Earth began to melt, raising global sea levels.
At that time, the four Channel Islands off Santa Barbara San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz and Anacapa formed a single, larger island, called Santarosae.
University of California, Santa Barbara scientist Ed Keller discovered Santarosae's smaller neighbor while poring over recently created topographic maps of the Santa Barbara Channel, a seismically active region crisscrossed with faults.
The discovery is a reminder of how advances in science in this case, sonar technology can restore to view land masses thought lost millennia ago.
"It's magnificent. We're just seeing some fantastic, very interesting things we thought we couldn't see or couldn't conceive of," said H. Gary Greene, a research scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, which mapped the region in 1998 with a shipboard sonar.
The new maps show the protrusion at near-photographic resolution.
Keller spotted the unusual uprising while examining a 31-mile-long ridge in the middle of the channel.
Unlike the comparatively smooth ocean bottom around it, the protrusion was marked by features that suggested it been pounded by waves, rain and wind something that could have occurred only if it had once stuck up above sea level.
"It had enough of the features that we suspect it was an island," said Keller, a professor of geological sciences and environmental studies at the oceanside university. He first presented his findings last fall at the Geological Society of America's meeting in Boston.
He dubbed his discovery "Calafia," after a mythical queen who ruled over the race of Amazons who inhabited the island of California in a popular 16th century Spanish romance novel.
Keller said Calafia was one of about 26 islands and islets thought to exist off the California coast at the peak of the last ice age. Today, there are about 16 separate land masses.
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