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In January and February 2023, waves along a stretch of San Diego coastline briefly turned a striking shade of fuchsia, the result of a deliberate scientific experiment rather than any natural phenomenon. Researchers from UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Washington released a bright pink, non-toxic dye into Los Peñasquitos Lagoon, a small tidal estuary within Torrey Pines State Beach and Natural Reserve, to study something surprisingly understudied in ocean science: how small-scale freshwater plumes behave once they reach the breaking surf zone along the coast.