Monterey Bay littered with golf balls

A shank, a slice, a hook. If you’ve ever swung a golf club, you’ve done all of those, and more than likely it resulted in a lost golf ball.

Sometimes lost in a water hazard. For a handful of gorgeous golf courses in Pebble Beach, that water hazard is the Monterey Bay. On a daily bases hundreds of balls flood the ocean floor and until 2016, no one had though much about it. Insert Alex Weber. When she was just a sophomore in high school, she decided that the golf balls littering the ocean floor was a big environmental problem.

She reached out to Matthew Savoca, a researcher at Hopkins Marine Station. Since then they have studied how golf balls eroding in the Monterey Bay is a danger to marine life.

Weber, the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, and Pebble Beach Company have now collected over 50,000 golf balls out of the Bay.

Tonight at 5 p.m. on KION News Channel 5/46 learn more about this unique environmental study that is likely saving marine life.