Quick access to deep water and a unique underwater topography make the Nimitz Marine Facility home to many key scientific expeditions by Scripps Oceanography and a collaborative Navy.
By Tyler Faurot / Pt Loma – OB Monthly / Nov. 13, 2022
For decades, Point Loma has served as home port to dozens of momentous research expeditions in the field of oceanography. The knowledge gained has led to military victories and medical breakthroughs and has taken mankind to realms once unfathomable. Those successes are owed to an amalgam of factors unique to the area.
Bruce Appelgate, associate director of UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, says the Point Loma area offers several advantages to researchers.
“It’s a combination of many things,” Appelgate said. “The infrastructure that the city [of San Diego] maintains here, the proximity to the Navy — a huge partner for us — and the location of the marine facility so close to the deep Pacific Ocean. This is one of the finest places for a research marine facility in the United States. It rivals anywhere else in the world.”
Appelgate said the climate in San Diego allows for year-round maintenance of research vessels. He also credits the deepwater harbor in San Diego Bay, where Scripps Oceanography docks its four ships — the Bob and Betty Beyster, Robert Gordon Sproul, Roger Revelle and Sally Ride. The Scripps Institution stages year-round expeditions out of the 6-acre Nimitz Marine Facility in Point Loma, which was formally given to the University of California by the Navy in 1967.
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