A new study found that about 16% of people who died from COVID-19 in the first two years of the pandemic weren’t counted in the official US tally, totalling about 155,000. This is on top of the 840,000 officially reported deaths, as many of these died outside of hospitals.

As the Associated Press and Fox LiveNow report, a new study published in the journal Science Advances has found that COVID-19 deaths in the United States were significantly undercounted in the first two years of the pandemic. The study, which used artificial intelligence to analyze mortality data, suggested about 16% of COVID-19 deaths during that period went unrecognized.

This translates to roughly 155,000 additional deaths beyond the 840,000 that were officially recorded in 2020 and 2021. Over the past six years, the report shows, there have been a total of 1.2 million COVID-19 deaths in the US.

The uncounted deaths disproportionately involved Hispanic people and other communities of color, particularly in states like Alabama, Oklahoma, and South Carolina, as the AP reports, as many died at home and were never counted in hospital death tolls.

In some areas, according to the report, elected coroners handle death investigations rather than medical examiners, but they often lack specialized training, which can affect how causes of death are determined.

Political views may have also influenced whether individuals sought testing, the reports suggests, and some coroners reported receiving pressure from families to keep COVID-19 off their loved ones' death certificates.

"Our antiquated death investigation system is one key reason why we fell short of accurate counts, particularly outside of big metropolitan areas," said Andrew Stokes of Boston University, the senior author on the paper.

Steven Woolf, a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher, told LiveNow that barriers remain for the same people now as they did six years ago.

"People on the margins continue to die at disproportionate rates because they can’t access care," he said.

Image: Ergin Yalcin/Getty Images

This week, 4/14-20, we present a few stand-out events among a huge roster of Earth Day, Easter, and 420 festivities, including Nerd Nite, a Tenderloin walking tour, a comedy-dating show, and a spirituality and psychedelics conference.

Thursday

• Nerd Nite SF celebrates its 150th show at the Rickshaw Stop this month. Explore the universe, unravel modern evil, and debunk pelvic health myths in one unforgettable evening. Talks include cosmic origins with physicist John Groh, a sharp look at societal darkness from teacher Parsa Moein, and a myth-busting pelvic health session with Dr. Karah Charette. Plus: tunes by DJ&Jelly and a pop-up from SF Public Library.

Friday

• At the Love Isn’t Blind comedy-dating show at the Foundry, silent bachelors compete for one lucky bachelorette through games like unlocking their phones and calling their moms. Audience members join the fun with relationship-status wristbands and help from a roaming wingcouple. “Let's judge a book by its cover,” proclaims the event’s tagline.

Saturday

• Historian Linda Day’s Hot Pads, Cool Town: Living in the 1920s walking tour delves into the Tenderoin’s post-1906 rebirth through its architecture and vibrant nightlife. Learn how residents “lived large” in small spaces, creating a rich cultural scene in early 20th-century San Francisco. (You’re sure to see many Rousseau buildings along the route.) Tour tickets also include admission to the Tenderloin Museum.
• Celebrate Earth Day at Yerba Buena Gardens on April 19 with live music, hands-on eco-activities, and a Green Business Expo featuring local sustainable vendors. Enjoy family-friendly fun like tree planting, nature tours, and giveaways. Free and open to all—RSVP encouraged!
• Sea-loving youngsters should head to the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park for Junior Park Ranger Day, a free day of hands-on fun exploring maritime history and culture. Try activities like boatbuilding, ropemaking, scrimshaw, and catch the returning Mermaid puppet show. All ages welcome.

Sunday

Sunday is jam-packed with a slew of the usual spring festivals and Easter events, including the Cherry Blossom Parade and Festival, Bring Your Own Big Wheel Race, and the beloved Hunky Jesus Contest.

• While 420 was canceled at Hippie Hill, there’s an adults-only 420 Easter egg hunt over in Oakland on Sunday as part of the Spirituality & Beyond 5 + Oakland Psychedelic Conference. This two-day gathering at the Kaiser Center features psychedelic pioneers, spiritual leaders, and community voices exploring the intersection of consciousness, culture, and plant medicine. Expect keynotes, cannabis-friendly zones, and a free outdoor fair with vendors and live programming.

Bay Area companies are leading the charge in sustainable tech: Nokia expands its semiconductor hub to San Jose; Lightmatter unveils an energy-efficient AI processor; Savor Foods introduces carbon-based butter; and Longshot Space develops a low-cost, cargo space launch system.

Nokia is expanding in the semiconductor market with a new photonic chip production hub in San Jose, creating up to 200 tech jobs. The facility, which is part of Nokia's strategy after acquiring Infinera, aims to meet the growing demands of AI while reducing environmental impact.

Photonic chips use light instead of electrical signals, producing less heat than traditional chips. This improves energy efficiency and reduces the need for expensive cooling systems, lowering data center carbon footprints. By advancing photonic semiconductors, Nokia is driving innovation in sustainable, high-performance computing.

The expansion is supported by $40 million in federal funding from the CHIPS and Science legislation. The project will also create construction jobs as the building gets renovated.

On a related note, Silicon Valley startup Lightmatter has unveiled a new AI processor that uses light, rather than electricity, to perform computations — a promising step toward energy-efficient processing. The chip, called Passage M1000, was developed in partnership with GlobalFoundries and is designed to reduce the energy demands of complex machine learning tasks by generating less heat and requiring less cooling.

While early results suggest potential efficiency gains, widespread impact could take years as the technology matures and scales. Still, Lightmatter’s approach reflects growing momentum toward more sustainable AI infrastructure.

San Jose-based startup Savor Foods, backed by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, has launched a sustainable butter made entirely from carbon — no animal or plant-based oils included. Using captured carbon dioxide and hydrogen from water, Savor produces fat molecules chemically identical to those found in milk, meat, and vegetable oils.

The butter alternative is already turning heads in top bakeries and Michelin-starred restaurants and aims to replace high-impact fats like palm oil in packaged foods. With FDA self-affirmation in place, Savor plans to scale production at its new Illinois facility and is working with major food companies to co-develop customizable ingredients.

The process uses a fraction of the water and land of traditional agriculture and releases no greenhouse gases—marking a major step toward a more sustainable global food system.

Longshot Space is rethinking how we send cargo to space — not with rockets, but with a giant gas-powered launch system. The startup recently raised over $5 million to build a 500-meter prototype in the Nevada desert.

Designed for rugged, non-fragile payloads that can withstand extreme acceleration, the system isn’t suitable for people or sensitive equipment. But for the right use cases, it could offer a lower-cost, lower-emissions alternative to traditional launches.

Instead of burning rocket fuel, Longshot uses compressed gas to push payloads to hypersonic speeds. If successful at scale, the company says it could reduce launch costs to $10 per kilogram — a major drop from the $6,000 charged by SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

Longshot isn’t aiming to replace rockets but to carve out a niche in fast, cost-effective, and potentially more sustainable cargo launches. Backed by the U.S. Department of Defense, the team is awaiting FAA approval to begin construction.

Image: US Department of Energy/Raw Pixel

Image: Leanne Maxwell/SFist

Image: Leanne Maxwell/SFist

• Eric Rombough, one of the disgraced former officers involved in the scandals surrounding the Antioch Police Department, changed his tune on the witness stand yesterday while testifying against former colleague Morteza Amiri. Rombough admitted that he enjoyed inflicting violence on city residents and went on to say that he and Amiri gave each other incentives for the violence, including rewarding each other with a "filet mignon dinner or milk and cookies presented by the other’s wife." [Mercury News]
• Law firm Perkins Coie LLP, which has a large Bay Area presence, has become the target of one of Trump’s executive orders. The executive order said about the firm, which represented Hillary Clinton in 2016: “The dishonest and dangerous activity of the law firm Perkins Coie LLP has affected this country for decades.“ [San Francisco Business Times]
• Five prisoners were injured in a riot involving about 40 inmates using improvised instruments at California State Prison in Sacramento. Two inmates allegedly used an improvised instrument to kill a fellow prisoner the week prior. [SFGate]
• The Bay Football Club, which began its inaugural season with the National Women’s Soccer League last year, is building a state-of-the-art facility on Treasure Island. The facility is expected to be ready by the 2027 season. [YIMBY]
• OpenAI founder Sam Altman’s World Network has pulled out of a deal at the last minute to occupy office space at Mission Rock‘s Building B, which is part of the new 28-acre long, mixed-use  development along the waterfront. [Chronicle]
• Hundreds rallied for science at the Stand Up for Science protest at City Hall in San Francisco and across the country in response to the Trump administration’s attempts to cut funding for critical medical research. [NBC Bay Area]

National:

• After a heated exchange between Elon Musk and Mark Rubio during yesterday's Cabinet meeting in which Rubio refused to fire his staff, Trump showed some indication that he might be ready to set limits on Musk’s “chain saw approach to upending the government." He said he still supports Musk’s initiative, but it might be time to rein it in. [New York Times]
• Government officials are lauding the US African Development Foundation (USADF) as "the little agency that could" when workers managed to successfully bar DOGE officials from entering their headquarters on Wednesday. DOGE staffers gained access the next day with US marshals in tow when no staff were present. [Guardian]
• The US State Department has halted an initiative that helped dozens of cities around the world improve their air quality, which researchers say paid for itself. [Wired]
• Gene Hackman died of heart disease complicated by advanced Alzheimer’s a week after his wife died of hantavirus, and he might not have been aware she died. [SFGate]
• Nationwide protests continue this weekend, including the Women’s March “Unite and Resist” tomorrow in observance of International Women’s Day. [MSNBC]

Video of the Day:

• Lombard Street on a busy weekend.

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A post shared by Eric Thurber (@thurber_shots)

Leanne Maxwell/SFist

Three recently fired NOAA researchers are speaking out about their team's important work protecting vulnerable species along the Northern California coast, which was abruptly disrupted last Thursday when over 800 probationary employees at the agency were fired.

Matt Koller, Allison Cluett, and Heather Welch were part of a team called the Climate, Ecosystems, and Fisheries Initiative at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which has been working to create a nationwide support system providing timely climate change information, tools, and advice to agencies and nonprofits that manage the coast.

The researchers spoke to ABC7 about their work and how they fear the recent firings will impact the Northern California coastline for "generations to come." The trio's jobs involved protecting species along the coast, such as whales, great white sharks, salmon, and Dungeness crab.

Some of the projects they worked on include preventing collisions between commercial ships and whales, monitoring changing ocean temperatures, and anticipating threats to the habitats of different species.

The researchers are determined to continue their work in spite of the recent layoffs. Several state governments are looking to snap up former federal employees, including Hawaii, Washington State, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York.

Considering California is home to the most federal workers in the country — according to Economic Policy Institute, here's hoping California is next in line, and this critical work protecting our coastline can continue.

Previously: Friday Morning Constitutional: Mass Layoffs Deal a Blow to NOAA

Image: Goat Rock, Sonoma County; Don McCullough/Flickr

For the first time since the 1800s, the Farallon Islands will no longer have a year-round human presence. Due to federal budget cuts that predate the current administration, as well as $10 million in needed repairs, biologists from Point Blue Conservation Science will now leave in September, returning only seasonally from mid-March to mid-September, according to the Chronicle.

This change threatens decades of conservation efforts that helped species like common murres and northern fur seals recover. Without researchers on site, key data on elephant seals, white sharks, and whale migrations will be lost, and the islands will be more vulnerable to human disturbances. The reduced presence also means fewer resources to combat invasive species like house mice, which disrupt the fragile ecosystem.

Officials estimate that scaling back will lower annual maintenance costs from $600,000 to about $106,400, but essential infrastructure, including the island’s crane and water systems, remains in disrepair. Point Blue is urgently seeking funding to maintain a year-round presence in some capacity, hoping for a last-minute solution to avoid abandoning the islands entirely.

Previously: Two Dozen Killer Whales Spotted Off Farallon Islands, Likely There To Chow On Seals And Baby Whales

Image: Sharon Mollerus/Flickr

• Mid-morning commuters’ damp bus rides were made worse today by technical issues along Muni’s subway system. Starting at around 10:30 a.m., riders between West Portal and Embarcadero stations were told to take surface-level bus lines and Metro shuttles. [S.F. Chronicle]
• A San Francisco man was charged with a hate crime and assault after allegedly brandishing a semi-automatic firearm and hurling hate-fueled threats at a man of Mexican-descent and his friends in a Tenderloin garage. The suspect is being held without bail, awaiting a preliminary hearing on February 11th. [Hoodline]
• Lawrence Livermore Laboratory is testing OpenAI’s AI models in fusion research, hoping to refine simulations that could lead to scalable, clean energy solutions. The models will be deployed on Venado, an Nvidia-powered supercomputer, which will serve as a shared resource between Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Laboratories. [S.F. Business Times, Open AI]
• The City of San Francisco has settled a lawsuit with the organizers of the Stern Grove Festival, agreeing to pay $225,000 in lost revenue when a 2021 water main rupture flooded the Stern Grove amphitheater. Organizers were forced to cancel the festival’s biggest concert of the season that year, an annual fundraiser featuring Oakland funk band Tower of Power and rapper Too $hort. [S.F. Chronicle]
• The installation of the proposed statue of a 45-foot tall nude woman that was set to be unveiled in Union Square has been delayed due to “unforeseen engineering challenges.” [Union Square SF]
• A man who fled into a South San Francisco classroom while fleeing from police during a narcotics investigation failed to appear in court on Thursday. [KRON4]

National:

• It’s Groundhog Day on Sunday, and apparently Punxsutawney Phil has some stiff competition, including a tortoise and a statue. Experts predict above-average temperatures in some parts of the country and below-average for others this spring, most of California falling under the “Equal Chances” zone. [U.S. News & World Report]
• A new border fence near Washington state aimed to prevent mistaken crossings, but it instead raised legal concerns. Canadian officials removed it after an investigation. [CBC]
• The NFL is experimenting with AI using Sony’s Hawk-Eye system, the same technology used in tennis, to make first-down calls faster and more reliable. The shift away from traditional measurements has sparked debate among players and fans. [NBC News]
• Former Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd announced his departure from NBC News and urged national media to rebuild trust by strengthening local journalism. Todd hinted at future projects but remained quiet on the details. [WTOP]

Video of the Day:

Here's a little pick-me-up on this dreary day with a nostalgic look at North Beach in the early 1980s.

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Image: Folsom Street looking west, SoMa, 2024; Leanne Maxwell/SFist

For the past three decades, Nancy Wallace, a professor of finance and real estate at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and a former adviser to the U.S. Treasury Department and Federal Reserve, has been channeling her harrowing escape from the 1991 Oakland Hills Firestorm into groundbreaking research on climate risk, as detailed in a recent NPR piece.

The fire, which killed 25 people and destroyed nearly 3,000 homes, spurred Wallace to investigate how extreme weather events like wildfires threaten housing, real estate, and insurance markets. Her work combines digitized mapping and financial data to assess these risks, uncovering vulnerabilities in fire insurance and mortgage systems.

Wallace’s research reveals alarming trends in California’s fire-prone housing markets. Insurance companies are canceling policies or raising premiums for high-risk areas, leaving millions of homeowners unprotected. Yet rebuilding continues in these zones, often with larger, more expensive homes. Wallace’s team discovered that wildfires act as a gentrifying force, increasing property values within five years of a fire.

To combat these issues, Wallace advocates for a shift from outdated, deterministic insurance pricing to probabilistic models that account for future climate risks. By modernizing how risks are priced and managed, Wallace aims to stabilize markets, protect homeowners, and confront the escalating impacts of climate change on housing and insurance.

Top image: Photo via Wikimedia

Ambrose Bierce, author of satirical classic The Devil's Dictionary, once humorously described San Francisco as a mere “point upon a map" of its now widely known fog.

The often mercurial weather phenomenon, often affectionately dubbed "Karl" after an often acerbic, parody Twitter account, and undoubtedly a key feature of the city's mystique, now faces a murky future with global temperatures on the rise.

In a story published this weekend, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that scientists are currently unsure how climate change will affect the San Francisco's trademark mist, but that fog overall has seen sharp declines in other parts of the state.

Rachel Clemesha, an oceanographer who specializes in California's coastal clouds, told the Chronicle that the shroud of mystery surrounding fog's future prospects in San Francisco is fueled by a current inability to adequately model it.

“Clouds and fog are really hard to simulate in climate models. There’s so many scales at play, [from] the chemistry in the raindrop to circulation that’s on the global scale," she said.

Clemesha, who has been quoted in the New York Times as saying that she "[doesn't]  know enough" to express anything with confidence, is part of a growing and multidisciplinary cadre of scholars interested in San Francisco's signature gray blanket. These experts assert that a potential decline in fog could spell disaster for the local environment, as moisture brought by the fog is critical to the survival of everything from redwood trees to cultivated fruit, and even certain amphibians.

Dr. Todd Dawson, another fog expert with decades of experience studying ecology, told the Times in the same article that "less fog would be a game-changer for a lot of things." He found in a watershed 2010 study of observational data that fog has dropped by a third since the 1950s. In the past, he stated publicly that San Francisco has "basically lost three hours per day of fog" in recent years.

Additional studies analyzing Southern California's fog levels have reported similar findings, attributing the change to the urban "heat island effect" and a reduction in harmful air pollutants.

However, some researchers are skeptical, pointing out that Dawson's study only took data from two specific airports respectively located in Arcata and Monterey. They note that climate change might even increase fog levels by creating stronger winds, which would drive fog further inland and help atmospheric moisture to condense into fog.

Dawson, though, is unfazed by the dispute. He believes strongly that regardless of climate change's exact effects on fog, there's only one definitive path to maintaining San Francisco's signature gloom: stopping climate change, and soon, with the added caveat of it being a global issue not exclusive to just California.

"We have to curb global warming. Californians can’t do this by themselves," said Dawson in an interview with the Public Policy Institute of California, "Everything we do in California has to happen everywhere—this is a local problem with a global solution. We’re all interconnected."

The very rare and very peculiar Amorphophallus titanum is about to bloom at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers.

SF Weekly delivers the odorous news of the "Terra the Titan," a plant that blooms only once every three or four years — and only for a day. Even more curious, the blooming plant has the distinct smell of rotting flesh or rotting meat. Naturally, everyone is super psyched to smell this beast.

The Conservatory is currently is possession of "Terra the Titan" and expects her to blossom sometime between June 13 and June 15. Basically, San Francisco flower nerds are anticipating the birth of extreme funk.

Explains the Weekly:

The Amorphophallus titanum grows in the rainforests on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia, and it looks like it was sent by a race of sentient plants to colonize Earth. A relative of the calla lily and the cuckoo pint that can grow to nine feet, it's the largest flower in the world, and its unpleasant aroma is an evolutionary adaptation meant to attract beetles that feast on carrion, in order to help pollinate it. Even in the wild, these flowers bloom rarely, so when a cultivated specimen flowers, it's even more exciting — especially for fans of rotting fish, sweaty sock, human feces, Limburger cheese, and everything else that goes into its rich smell.

Okay well now we kinda have to smell this.

The University of California, Berkeley Botanical Garden had a "corpse flower" of its own briefly bloom in 2015 and at least 1,000 folks lined-up for the stinky opportunity to get a whiff.

The Conservatory's fetid treasure comes courtesy of Mission resident Sidney Price, who grew three Amorphophallus titanums in his bathroom until they became too big to handle in 2014. "These beautiful plants are getting destroyed in their native habitat. It was worth trying to grow them, and my bathroom, it turns out, was perfect!" Price explained to the Weekly.

While it comes as no surprise that something smelly grew inside of a Mission District residential restroom, we're betting hundreds of San Franciscans will happily line up to inhale a rare sniff of the blooming "Terra the Titan."

Related: Reservoir Algae Bloom Causes Foul Tasting, Smelling Tap Water

Bow-tied crusader Bill Nye the Science Guy refuses to bow out of the public eye. While his 1990s PBS show now exists only in reruns, Nye is still seen debating creationists, defending vaccinations, and appearing at this year’s SF Sketchfest. He’s in town promoting the new documentary Bill Nye: Science Guy that plays tonight at the Victoria as part of the SFFILM Festival, and SFist chatted Nye up as he prepared for his SF appearance after tonight’s screening.

“It’s the most important film you’ll ever watch,” Nye declared to SFist. “I don’t think I’m exaggerating.” (NOTE: He was kind of exaggerating.) But Nye’s work in proving the existence of climate change, and humankind’s possible role in creating the phenomenon, is covered in the film, and yes, obviously that's phenomenally important.

“We go to Greenland,” Nye said of one the film’s main components. “And we meet the researchers who are drilling into the ice sheet where they count neutrons and the oxygen atoms, to determine the sea surface temperature that created the cloud that became the snow that became the ice over the last few tens of thousands of years.”

“We talk about abrupt climate change,” Nye continued. “This very troubling thing where the earth’s climate seems to have changed radically in just two decades. And the record of this is in the ice, the ice is irrefutable.”

Bill Nye also has a series of kids books out called Jack and the Genuises, which involves children's adventures in ocean water desalination. This summer he’ll release the more grownup book Everything All at Once: How Nerds Solve Problems.

“It’s my advice on how to conduct the affairs of the entire world. How wrong could I be?” Nye asked SFist rhetorically.

Given Bill Nye the Science Guy’s concern over the state of the planet, I couldn’t help but ask his opinion on what we regular, everyday Bay Area people can do to save the world.

“What we need to do is electrify all ground transportation,” Nye said. “We want to make all our electricity renewably — wind, solar, some geothermal. Don’t shut down any existing nuclear plants, but phase them out when they get near their retirement, when it’s relicense time. And then we need to solve the problem of air transportation, it’s probably hydrogen fuel, that’s probably going to be the best thing. But that’s where we need to throw basic research money.”

That stuff is all way beyond my pay grade, but Nye also offered a simpler strategy. “We gotta vote in this 2018 election,” Nye said. “Vote, vote, vote. We’ve got to turn this thing around.”

‘Bill Nye: Science Guy’ screens tonight at 6 p.m. at the Victoria Theatre, with Bill Nye in attendance for an audience Q&A after the show. Advance tickets are no longer available, but Rush Line seats will be sold on a first-come, first-serve basis to those waiting in a line that will begin forming 60 minutes prior to showtime. There are plenty of tickets still available for the Tuesday, April 18 screening of ‘Bill Nye: Science Guy’ at Alamo Drafthouse.

Hey everyone, it's time for the annual Perseid meteor shower! And, as it's San Francisco in August, that also means it's time for everyone to get disappointed that their view of the Perseid meteor shower is obstructed by clouds. However, there are a few ways for fog-bound San Franciscans to see the hours-long light show, and as KQED News reports not all of them involve getting out of the city.

First, lets start with the basics. What is this thing, anyway? The good folks at NASA have put together a helpful explainer which drops the following bits of knowledge. The light streaks you'll see in the sky are "tiny specks of comet-stuff hitting Earth's atmosphere at very high speed and disintegrating in flashes of light." The comet in question is 109P/Swift-Tuttle (impress your friends with that), and thanks to Jupiter's gravity moving some of the comet debris around, this year's show is going to be more spectacular than usual. "Even though the moon phase is not the best for viewing, the 2016 shower will be an outburst, with rates double the normal levels," NASA explains.

That translates to up to 200 meteors per hour tonight and Friday night.

"Every Perseid meteor is a tiny piece of the comet Swift-Tuttle, which orbits the sun every 133 years," NASA further explains. "Each swing through the inner solar system can leave trillions of small particles in its wake. When Earth crosses paths with Swift-Tuttle’s debris, specks of comet-stuff hit Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrate in flashes of light. These meteors are called Perseids because they seem to fly out of the constellation Perseus."

So there you have it.

Prime time to see the meteor show is around 1:10 a.m., but you should be able to spot something starting around 11:00 p.m. If you're sticking in San Francisco (where it is expected to be cloudy), KQED News says that as long as you get in a "moon shadow" and look to the north-east you'll be good. "Have the moon be blocked by a tree or a chubby neighbor,” Foothill College's astronomy professor Andrew Fraknoi told the publication.

If you want to be sure to see some meteors, however, your best bet will be to head out of SF. Thankfully, there are plenty of great viewing spots. Get yourself to Lawrence Berkeley Lab or Vollmer Peak located in Tilden Park. Or, if you're lazy, there's a much easier option: NASA will livestream the media shower (the stream starts at 7:00 p.m. PST and is embedded below) so you don't even have to leave your bed.

Happy gazing!

Previously: Where To Watch The Perseid Meteor Shower Tonight

Landing at SFO can be a pretty, if sometimes harrowing experience (short runway). A nice distraction: The salt marshes that form a quilt of various umbers around the southern part of SF Bay. More than an interesting sight, such marshes might be a crucial, natural solution to the sea level rise that threatens our region.

Earlier this month, the San Francisco Planning commission announced its Sea Level Rise Action Plan amid projections of rising oceans: Up to 1.4 meters by 2100. In the wake of that rise would be everything from schools and hospitals to airports and tech campuses. Research published in Nature shows San Mateo is particularly at risk.

“If we choose not to act on the real threats of sea level rise, we are choosing to put some of the most socially and economically vulnerable communities, and some of its most valuable real estate, at significant risk," says John Rahaim, Director of San Francisco Planning. As Gil Kelley, the Planning Department’s director of citywide planning, added for the Chronicle, "The plan doesn’t propose specific programs and solutions. It’s a call to get those programs in place... Ultimately, we’re going to need large fixes."

As Scientific American discusses, the muddy marshlands surrounding the Bay might represent one such "large" fix. "Besides being a biodiversity hotspot, marshes are cheap and effective insurance," Scientific American writes. "They are natural, resilient buffers against rising water. They dissipate the wave energy, absorb tidal waters like a sponge, and slowly release the water back into the bay... a restored marshland is a promising front line armor."

The South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project, which under Senator Dianne Feinstein's leadership since 2003 has been at work converting an area larger than Manhattan back into tidal marshlands, provides one salient example of developing marshland as buffer. But for that project to succeed, it needs more mud. 53 million cubic meters of sediment just to kickstart tidal restoration, to be exact. "Sediment is critical to wetland," said Letitia Grenier, the lead scientist on a 2015 report about climate change and the bay. "It means life." As Scientific American elaborates,

"Marshes depend on mud. Once the levees are breached, the tides wash in mud, twice a day, day after day. This mud brings nutrients. Then, with the addition of light and carbon dioxide, a chain of events sets off in the estuary. First, phytoplankton like cyanobacteria and green algae spread through the muddy waters. Krill drift around and feed on the phytoplankton. Snails, shellfish, California bay shrimp and worms eat up the mud they live in. Shorebirds like avocets, willets and godwit swoop in and dig their beaks deep in the mud for the worms. Striped bass and the chinook salmon swim in and out to feed on worms and crustaceans. Over the years, peregrine falcons and leopard sharks start to hang out at levee breaches for the smaller fish and birds. When there's enough sediment, the plants will start growing. Endangered species like the salt marsh harvest mice and Ridgway's rail start foraging around the marsh. Marshland is born again, ever eager for more mud."

How to get that mud cycle going, then? Get more of it, which will lead to more sediment on its own. But so far, we've just gotten rid of the stuff. Where once about 200,000 acres of marsh lay, Gold and Silver Rush-era miners began diking the marshes to produce salt in hopes of refining mined ore. Agriculture and development also depleted marshland.

To replace what's been lost, enter "dirt brokers." Says John Bourgeois, executive manager of the restoration project, #8220;There's a lot of dirt in the market now,” said John Bourgeois, the restoration project’s executive manager. That could include dirt from development projects and more, but so far the Salt Pond Restoration Project has used little recycled mud.

Further, even once you've got the dirt in hand, depositing it in the marshland is tricky. Bares can't get close and bulldozers alone can't help.

For now, the marshes remain beautiful — striking enough to inspire retired UC Berkeley professor Cris Benton to publish birds-eye images in Saltscapes: The Kite Aerial Photography of Cris Benton, in 2013. But surely Benton — and we, too — could use a little more marsh to work with.

Related: Mapping The Projected 8 Foot Sea Level Rise In San Francisco