BERKELEY, CALIF. — The Pacific Ocean is the most significant geographical feature on the face of the earth, covering 30 percent of the planet’s surface—and it is at Ocean Beach that this colossus meets land in the city of San Francisco. Here at the western edge of the city, the confluence of waves, winds, and moon tides have given rise to a one-of-a-kind ecosystem beloved by surfers, locals, and tourists the world over. Ocean Beach: Fog, Fauna, and Flora, part love letter, part guidebook, is an illustrated primer on the atmospheric forces that shape this shoreline and the plant and animal life teeming in the sea, soaring overhead, and burgeoning forth from its sands.

Written by Eddy Rubin and illustrated by Greg Wright, Ocean Beach is divided into three sections that explore, in turn, the climatic conditions of the beach, the wildlife who populate it, and the plants that thrive in its coastal interface. Rubin reveals how the mighty California Current combines with northwesterly winds to create the city’s world-famous gray mist—Karl the Fog—which pours through the Golden Gate and blankets the beach’s outlying neighborhoods, lending San Francisco it’s cool summer temperatures and giving rise to the swells that have made Ocean Beach a surfer’s destination since the 1940s. Profiles of the beach’s animalian denizens—from the iconic gulls and sea lions to the lesser seen sand crabs and moon jellyfish—delight in each species’ quirks. And spotlights of local plant life range from the seaswept bull kelp to the hardy ice plant dotting the dunes.

Threatened by rising sea levels and ocean acidification, this delicate ecosystem offers a valuable reprieve from the metropolis to its east. Separated from the city by the Great Highway, recently repurposed as a pedestrian pathway by popular vote, Ocean Beach is an extraordinary strip of coastline the future of which will be shaped by civic policy and management. “The Ocean Beach of the future may look different from the one we know today,” says Rubin, “but its essence—a place of natural wonder, a refuge from urban life, and a reminder of our place in the larger ecosystem—can endure.” This book invites the reader to witness with wonder this wild retreat at the city’s outer rim, with a call to protect and conserve it for generations to come.