Underwater mountain of Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary is
haven for sea life Published: Saturday, February 9, 2013 at 3:05
p.m. Last Modified: Saturday, February 9, 2013 at 3:29 p.m.
About 25 miles southwest of Bodega Bay, just beyond the horizon
on a clear day, a huge rocky mountain rises from the muddy ocean
floor to within 120 feet of the blue Pacific surface. The 93
million-year-old formation, once a chunk of the southern Sierra
Nevada, sheared off and slowly edged along the San Andreas fault
to the North Coast. It lay undiscovered until the 1850s and
wasn't seen by human eyes until 1978. But the 26-square-mile
granite mass known as Cordell Bank is a smorgasbord for scores
of species of seabirds and whales that fly and swim thousands of
miles to feast on an abundance of food procured by the wind, the
Earth's rotation and a southbound current that sweeps along the
California coast. Nutrients drawn from the ocean's frigid depths
provide the base of a food chain that sustains life forms
ranging from m