It turns out your craving for a beautiful coastal view while swinging on the links just might be a bad thing. Two years ago, intrepid young free diver Alex Weber was swimming along California's Pebble Beach golf course when she discovered a huge section of ocean floor completely covered in golf balls.The legendary golf course—home of the renowned Pro-Am tournament—claims a lot of coastline. But hidden out of sight off those dramatic cliffs is a large stash of golf balls. Alex, now 18, says she's removed over 50,000 of them, to be precise, per NPR. She stashed them in the family garage, where they reportedly smell real bad.After two years of removing golf balls with her dad and a researcher she brought along from Stanford, she has been published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin about their findings. They say that the golf balls are from five nearby golf courses—three north of Pebble Beach.From NPR:
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"You couldn't see the sand," she recalls, still sounding incredulous. "It was completely white."
White with golf balls. "You looked down and you're like, 'What are you doing here?' "
Golf balls are coated in a thin shell of polyurethane that degrades over time, releasing toxins into the water. Not to mention the plastic parts that can break off and get swallowed by sea creatures, or worse.It's not a good thing—despite the very soothing video—and it's just another example of the younger generation forced to clean up the mess made by those that came before them.There were thousands of them. "It felt like a shot to the heart," she says.