EXHIBIT OPENS WINDOW TO OCEAN\Tank, displays bring 7-year project to close.

Byline: Catalina Ortiz Associated Press

Dave Powell stood enraptured by the school of tuna racing through the expanse of azure water towering above him only a few feet away.

"You've got to change your thinking when you're looking at this. It's a different world," said Powell, director of live exhibit development for the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

This different world is the open ocean, little understood by us land-dwelling creatures. The internationally renowned aquarium soon will open a rare window on this vast and mysterious realm.

The Outer Bay exhibit, opening March 2, is the centerpiece of a $57 million expansion, a seven-year project that boosts the aquarium's size 40 percent.

The aquarium 120 miles south of San Francisco is widely considered one of the world's finest, with innovative displays of the habitats of Monterey Bay, from estuaries to tide pools to kelp forests.

But it took years of research - and some clever design and engineering - to produce the new exhibit, particularly its million-gallon tank, reproducing the seemingly boundless world at the outer edge of Monterey Bay and beyond.

The oval tank, 35 feet deep and 90 feet long, and containing more water than all the aquarium's other exhibits combined, is the crown jewel of the exhibit. It overwhelms visitors with a view through the world's largest uninterrupted window - a 13-inch-thick acrylic panel that stretches 15 feet high, 54 feet long and weighs 78,000 pounds.

Already in residence two weeks before opening were most of the tank's residents: speedy yellowfin tuna, bonito and barracuda; a blue shark and a flat sunfish, the world's largest bony fish that can grow to be 10 feet long. Sea turtles will be introduced before the exhibit opens.

Few of the creatures have been seen in aquariums before.

"We just like to share our excitement about these animals," Powell said as he looked with satisfaction at the enormous tank he first sketched on a dinner napkin.

Fostering love and knowledge of the marine world has been the central mission of the aquarium, one of California's top tourist attractions since it opened in October 1984 on Monterey's Cannery Row.

Nearly 20 million people, including 70,000 schoolchildren a year, have visited the nonprofit, self-supporting aquarium. It boasts more than 100 exhibits and galleries with 500 different plant and animal species from Monterey Bay.

But the open ocean and the sea's depths always beckoned.

"We've always had the dream of taking people offshore and transporting them to the environment that covers the majority of our planet," said marine biologist Julie Packard, the aquarium's executive director.

Everyone knew that a tank to reproduce the open ocean would have to be huge to accommodate fast-swimming species. Previous attempts to exhibit tuna have often ended with the fish fatally ramming themselves into the sides of the tanks. That happened to a couple of tuna at Monterey Bay until the fish got familiar with their new home.

The tank consists of a rectangular concrete structure 18 inches thick surrounding an egg-shape glass fiber shell reinforced with ribs of the same material. Sea water between them helps support the weight of the water contained by the shell.

Powell and others wanted viewers to feel they were peering into the ocean depths. They created the illusion with the curved glass fiber and the nearly 2 million tiny blue tiles that cover it.

But the giant tank isn't the exhibit's only attraction. More than 2,000 anchovies make a shimmering stream as they circle in a roundabout. Other exhibits display the strange and delicate beauty of jellyfish or plankton, the center of the ocean's food web.

And the aquarium isn't stopping with the outer bay. The new wing also will house an exhibit on the deep sea, the dark and cold habitat in the two-mile-deep Monterey Canyon. That exhibit is scheduled to open in 1999.

Powell and Packard are happy with how the Outer Bay exhibit has turned out. And they believe the aquarium has been successful in raising the public's awareness of - and concern for - the ocean.

"I absolutely feel we're making a difference, at a time where our need for concern about ocean preservation is greater than ever," Packard said. "The time is here for . . . three-quarters of the planet that affects all of us."

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