Tag Archives: geology
California v. II
… continued Metamorphosis About thirty million years ago, the trailing edge of the Farallon Plate began to disappear under North America in the shape of an inverted 90° wedge, beginning at the location of present-day Los Angeles, and proceeding northeast under the continent, leaving nothing but hot mantle where before was the cold, subducting oceanic [...]
California v. I
It’s common knowledge that water is the bane of fire, but the Earth tells us a different tale. Up to about 200 million years ago, at the dawn of the Jurassic Period, there was no California. It might be said that even North America didn’t exist. North America had then part of the supercontinent of [...]
Kissing the Killer
Throughout the lowlands singers sing of your deep, feminine soul; How reclining, you roll down your bed amidst your veils and embankments; They marvel at your fluent, accommodating ways, how you slip through the world, flowing around every obstacle, rounding every edge, and polishing every turn. You compel us, it is true, down to where [...]
Sisters of the Sierra
One special characteristic of the Sierra Nevada is that it’s a rare example of a high mountain range in a Mediterranean climate, which means that it is dry and sunny half the year and moist and mild during the other half of the year. This combination makes for a very combustible cycle of fuel production [...]
The Fire Below
Looking back millions upon millions of years ago to the tectonic events that gave birth to the San Andreas fault and California, earth scientists have been striving to determine what forces might have caused the southern Sierra Nevada to lose its root about 3.5 million years ago. It’s a good bet that a range of [...]
Watching Whales in the Sink
Much of my childhood was spent in the towns of Hanford and Tulare, in a region once called the Tulare Basin, not far from the dry bed of Tulare Lake. This name “Tulare Basin” might have had more meaning before Tulare Lake was drained for wheat and cotton, but it’s still got that “basin” feel [...]
What is California?
An enumeration of the elements of California might proceed as follows: The San Andreas Fault The California Current The Sierra Nevada The Central Valley Redwood Forests The San Andreas Fault The Pacific and North American Plates, two of the world’s largest, collide from the Gulf of California to Shelter Cove, just south of Cape Mendocino, [...]
California As Collision
Along the northeastern shore of the Great Ocean, a long, thin strip of land stretches 1500 miles, in about as straight a line as Nature will allow Herself to draw. The strip is born of the grinding of the great oceanic plate against the continental plate. From Cabo San Lucas to Cape Mendocino, California is [...]
Sierra California
The boundary between Southern and Northern California ignores the compass points, wrapping around the San Joaquin Valley from Tejon to Tehachapi and northward along the Sierra Crest to Tioga and around the northern limit of the Mono Basin. This is made necessary by the Sierra Nevada. The Los Angeles Aqueduct is perhaps the strongest argument [...]