Toxic Tides

Sunny Jiang, Ph.D., an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering studying pollution in Orange County's coastal waters, recently got a graphic look at how swimming and surfing in the ocean can make people sick.

She and a team of graduate students charted incidents of poor water quality at Southern California beaches over a 10-year period and the number of ocean-related illnesses reported at the Surfrider Foundation website during the same timeframe. Each graph looked like a series of waves, and when the two were overlapped, their peaks and valleys matched up perfectly.

Toxic Tides [ZotZine, Vol. II, Iss. 9: June 2010]