The Return of the Airliner Chronicles! The San Andreas Fault in San Francisco

I love flying. Well, I don't like airports. Or security lines. Or airliner food. Or uncontrollably crying babies (though I have sympathy for the poor parents sometimes). Or the incredibly small seats. Or the lack of foot room. Or looking for lost baggage. Or airport shuttles. I don't like all of that stuff.

But put me in a window seat on a clear day, and a route over a geologically interesting place, and I will be deliriously happy. I will easily snap dozens of pictures when conditions are right. The Airliner Chronicles was my first idea for a blog series, and I abandoned it for a few years only because I haven't flown anywhere since 2009. But I flew this holiday vacation, so I am pleased to return to the Chronicles once again.

I usually fly out of San Francisco, but it has been rare that I have had a clear view of the San Andreas fault in the Bay Area. On this flight, I almost felt the pilot knew I was on the left side, and that I wanted as many sight angles on the fault as possible, so he or she banked us nicely for four perspectives of the San Andreas fault as it runs from the hills above San Jose to the sea at Daly City near San Francisco.

Have you ever wondered how the San Andreas fault got its name? In 1895, U.C. Berkeley professor Andrew C. Lawson mapped a fault in the Bay Area that crossed San Andreas Lake/Reservoir (which is at the bottom of the first three photos; the other lake is Crystal Springs Reservoir). The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake made it clear that the fault was a much larger feature (200 miles fractured in 1906, but the fault extends some 600 miles to the Salton Sea area in Southern California).

The dam that holds back San Andreas Reservoir was damaged in the 1906 event, but the dam held. The west side of the fault (right side in the photo above) lurched about 9 feet northwest during the quake. Faults that move sideways like this are called strike-slip faults, and if the side of the fault opposite the observer moves to the right, it is a right-lateral strike-slip fault. The San Andreas is this type of fault.

Even more importantly, the San Andreas fault is a transform boundary, marking the spot where the Pacific Plate is moving northwest relative to the North American Plate (or the Sierra Nevada Microplate if you want to be really specific). The fault has been moving for nearly 30 million years, and has shifted 200 miles or more (roughly 2 inches per year). It would be more correct to say that the fault would shift 2 inches per year, but friction holds the sides of the fault in place until enough stress has built up (a century or two) that the fault breaks and moves 10-20 feet all at once in a large earthquake like the one in 1906.

We banked one more time and had a wonderful look at the entire San Francisco Peninsula before heading east towards the Sierra Nevada...

Introducing Pinnacles National PARK!

One of our nation's oldest national monuments is set to become our nation's newest national parks, and I couldn't be happier about it! Assuming the legislation is signed by President Obama, Pinnacles National Park will be one of the most geologically interesting parks in the system for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it lies on a major plate boundary, and provided critical evidence for understanding the movement of the San Andreas fault. It doesn't hurt that it is also one of the most scenic portions of the central Coast Ranges of California (mind you, Big Sur is beautiful too, but remarkably no part of Big Sur is a national park or monument).

Pinnacles was established in 1908 by Theodore Roosevelt under the auspices of the National Antiquities Act, which was one of the wisest acts of Congress ever. The act allowed presidents to establish monuments without congressional approval, and without it we might never have had Grand Canyon, Zion, Petrified Forest, Death Valley, or Joshua Tree National Parks, because all of them were established as monuments at first, often over local opposition. It often took decades, but Congress would eventually come to its senses and make the monuments into national parks, as it did this week with Pinnacles.

I have been taking geology classes on field studies trips to Pinnacles National Monument now for 24 years, and it has been a significant part of my blog explorations of California (click here for a sampling of some of my descriptions of the region). The geological attraction of the park is the 22 million year old extinct stratovolcano that erupted on top of the San Andreas fault in southern California near Palmdale and Lancaster in the Mojave Desert. Subsequent movement along the fault has carried the Pinnacles half of the volcano 195 miles northwest to its present location in the central Coast Ranges (the other half, called the Neenach volcanics, aren't nearly as scenic).

The ancient volcano has eroded into an intricate maze of spires and deep slot canyons. The High Peaks Trail loop, which traverses the most rugged part of the Pinnacles, is close to the top of my list of favorite hikes in the world (and mind you, that is a list that includes Angels Landing in Zion, Delicate Arch in Arches, the Grand Canyon, and the Burgess Shale in Canada). The slot canyons have in places been completely covered over by gigantic boulders, forming talus caves. One is a quarter mile long, and includes an underground waterfall.

The park has some great wildlife and botanical attractions to complement the wonderful geology. To this day it remains the only place where I've seen a wild bobcat. It is also home to one of the few populations of the California Condor, and they can often be viewed from the visitor center on the east side of the park.

Pinnacles National Monument was enlarged several years ago, and there is a proposal to incorporate ranchlands to the east across the San Andreas fault. This would be an excellent idea if the funding could be found to do it. The park is already an example of a transform boundary, and expansion would add rocks that formed in the Franciscan subduction zone that effected the region during Mesozoic and early Cenozoic time.

On a political note, I want to thank Representative Jeff Denham for co-sponsoring the legislation that is allowing the monument to become a park. Denham represents my district, and on most issues (really, all of them) we greatly disagree. But on this, he did good.

Pinnacles National Monument-soon-to-be Park can be accessed by paved roads from the west out of Soledad and King City, and from the east on roads out of Hollister and San Juan Bautista (no roads cross the monument). A campground is available on the east side of the park, and 30 miles of trails are available. The park is a popular technical rock-climbing area. There are only nine days left to comment, but an extensive management plan is being considered at this time. Information can be found by clicking here.

Revisiting the Geologist's Life List: The Resolution I Make Every Year

Many thanks to Andrew Alden over at About.com Geology for the idea to start my sixth year of geo-blogging (my blogoversary comes on January 7). I'm not one for making resolutions on New Year's Day, but I have a single long-standing resolution: Whenever I can, I try to visit someplace new, and learn something new about a place, even if I know it well.

Here is nearly the last new place of my 2012 year...probably a near future blogpost.

Back in 2008, a meme was going around about "100 things", which reminded me of an article by Lisa Rossbacher in Geotimes (now Earth) magazine around 1990 about the things all geologists should do before they pack it in. The list eventually made it onto the Internet courtesy of Terry Acomb, and I realized it would be fun to adapt the list into a list of 100 things you've done, Geologist version. Today I think of the list as very much a bucket list full of goals, and if I ever finish that list, I intend to start another more international version. Here is the only slightly abridged version of that post. In 2008 I counted 65% of my bucket list fulfilled, and note that since then I have added 3.5 to 4 more items (I finally made it to the green sand beach at South Point in Hawaii, saw varves, saw moving stones on a playa, but on Bonnie Claire Playa instead of the Racetrack, and just two days ago I saw a fair number of sinkholes in the suburbs of St. Louis). How far along are you? You can answer here or at Andrew's site; he thought of bringing it back up for consideration!

From December of 2008:
Memes can be fun, and there is one going around dealing with 100 things that you have done (two recent examples here and here). I counted about 54 things on those lists that I've done in my 51 years. The meme immediately reminded me of the single most influential column I can remember from Geotimes (now Earth), written in 1990 by Lisa Rossbacher on the places that all geologists should try and see in their lifetimes. The list went through several updates, and arrived on the internet in 1997 on a page put together by Terry Acomb, currently in Grand Junction, Colorado. By nice coincidence, the entire list totaled just about 100 items, so I have made only small changes in the content. I have mostly kept the originals; all such lists are very subjective, and if I fiddled with anything I would never have finished. I notice for one that the list tends towards being biased to sites in North America. I would love to see someone put together a purely world-wide list. One geologist I know essentially tried to see them all on one six month journey; you can read his story here.

Of course, the fun part of such a meme is the reliving of those great experiences. The picture above is my visit to the K/T boundary at Gubbio, Italy.

Here they are! Bold the ones you have done (mine are in the comments) and tell us some great stories!

1. See an erupting volcano
2. See a glacier
3. See an active geyser such as those in Yellowstone, New Zealand or the type locality of Iceland
4. Visit the Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) Boundary. Possible locations include Gubbio, Italy, Stevns Klint, Denmark, the Red Deer River Valley near Drumheller, Alberta.
5. Observe (from a safe distance) a river whose discharge is above bankful stage
6. Explore a limestone cave. Try Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, Lehman Caves in Great Basin National Park, or the caves of Kentucky or TAG (Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia)
7. Tour an open pit mine, such as those in Butte, Montana, Bingham Canyon, Utah, Summitville, Colorado, Globe or Morenci, Arizona, or Chuquicamata, Chile.
8. Explore a subsurface mine.
9. See an ophiolite, such as the ophiolite complex in Oman or the Troodos complex on the Island Cyprus (if on a budget, try the Coast Ranges or Klamath Mountains of California).
10. An anorthosite complex, such as those in Labrador, the Adirondacks, and Niger (there's some anorthosite in southern California too).
11. A slot canyon. Many of these amazing canyons are less than 3 feet wide and over 100 feet deep. They reside on the Colorado Plateau. Among the best are Antelope Canyon, Brimstone Canyon, Spooky Gulch and the Round Valley Draw.
12. Varves, whether you see the type section in Sweden or examples elsewhere.
13. An exfoliation dome, such as those in the Sierra Nevada.
14. A layered igneous intrusion, such as the Stillwater complex in Montana or the Skaergaard Complex in Eastern Greenland.
15. Coastlines along the leading and trailing edge of a tectonic plate (check out The Dynamic Earth - The Story of Plate Tectonics - an excellent website).
16. A gingko tree, which is the lone survivor of an ancient group of softwoods that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere in the Mesozoic.
17. Living and fossilized stromatolites (Glacier National Park is a great place to see fossil stromatolites, while Shark Bay in Australia is the place to see living ones)
18. A field of glacial erratics
19. A caldera
20. A sand dune more than 200 feet high
21. A fjord
22. A recently formed fault scarp
23. A megabreccia
24. An actively accreting river delta
25. A natural bridge
26. A large sinkhole
27. A glacial outwash plain
28. A sea stack
29. A house-sized glacial erratic
30. An underground lake or river
31. The continental divide
32. Fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals
33. Petrified trees
34. Lava tubes
35. The Grand Canyon. All the way down. And back.
36. Meteor Crater, Arizona, also known as the Barringer Crater, to see an impact crater on a scale that is comprehensible
37. The Great Barrier Reef, northeastern Australia, to see the largest coral reef in the world.
38. The Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada, to see the highest tides in the world (up to 16m)
39. The Waterpocket Fold, Utah, to see well exposed folds on a massive scale.
40. The Banded Iron Formation, Michigan, to better appreciate the air you breathe.
41. The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania,
42. Lake Baikal, Siberia, to see the deepest lake in the world (1,620 m) with 20 percent of the Earth's fresh water.
43. Ayers Rock (known now by the Aboriginal name of Uluru), Australia. This inselberg of nearly vertical Precambrian strata is about 2.5 kilometers long and more than 350 meters high
44. Devil's Tower, northeastern Wyoming, to see a classic example of columnar jointing
45. The Alps.
46. Telescope Peak, in Death Valley National Park. From this spectacular summit you can look down onto the floor of Death Valley - 11,330 feet below.
47. The Li River, China, to see the fantastic tower karst that appears in much Chinese art
48. The Dalmation Coast of Croatia, to see the original Karst.
49. The Gorge of Bhagirathi, one of the sacred headwaters of the Ganges, in the Indian Himalayas, where the river flows from an ice tunnel beneath the Gangatori Glacier into a deep gorge.
50. The Goosenecks of the San Juan River, Utah, an impressive series of entrenched meanders.
51. Shiprock, New Mexico, to see a large volcanic neck
52. Land's End, Cornwall, Great Britain, for fractured granites that have feldspar crystals bigger than your fist.
53. Tierra del Fuego, Chile and Argentina, to see the Straights of Magellan and the southernmost tip of South America.
54. Mount St. Helens, Washington, to see the results of recent explosive volcanism.
55. The Giant's Causeway and the Antrim Plateau, Northern Ireland, to see polygonally fractured basaltic flows.
56. The Great Rift Valley in Africa.
57. The Matterhorn, along the Swiss/Italian border, to see the classic "horn".
58. The Carolina Bays, along the Carolinian and Georgian coastal plain
59. The Mima Mounds near Olympia, Washington
60. Siccar Point, Berwickshire, Scotland, where James Hutton (the "father" of modern geology) observed the classic unconformity
61. The moving rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley
62. Yosemite Valley
63. Landscape Arch (or Delicate Arch) in Utah
64. The Burgess Shale in British Columbia
65. The Channeled Scablands of central Washington
66. Bryce Canyon
67. Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone
68. Monument Valley
69. The San Andreas fault
70. The dinosaur footprints in La Rioja, Spain
71. The volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands
72. The Pyrennees Mountains
73. The Lime Caves at Karamea on the West Coast of New Zealand
74. Denali (an orogeny in progress)
75. A catastrophic mass wasting event
76. The giant crossbeds visible at Zion National Park
77. The black sand beaches in Hawaii (or the green sand-olivine beaches)
78. Barton Springs in Texas
79. Hells Canyon in Idaho
80. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado
81. The Tunguska Impact site in Siberia
82. Feel an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5.0.
83. Find dinosaur footprints in situ84. Find a trilobite (or a dinosaur bone or any other fossil)
85. Find gold, however small the flake
86. Find a meteorite fragment
87. Experience a volcanic ashfall
88. Experience a sandstorm
89. See a tsunami
90. Witness a total solar eclipse
91. Witness a tornado firsthand. (Important rules of this game).
92. Witness a meteor storm, a term used to describe a particularly intense (1000+ per minute) meteor shower
93. View Saturn and its moons through a respectable telescope.
94. See the Aurora borealis, otherwise known as the northern lights.
95. View a great naked-eye comet, an opportunity which occurs only a few times per century
96. See a lunar eclipse
97. View a distant galaxy through a large telescope
98. Experience a hurricane
99. See noctilucent clouds
100. See the green flash

A Bit of River Perspective: The Eel River in Northern California

I was driving home from our Christmas visits with the family in central Oregon today. Since we were following Highway 101 through northern California's Redwood Country, we had a chance to look at the Eel River after several days of fairly intense rain. The picture above is a summertime view of the river from 2010 for sort of a baseline for comparing. As we drove along the river today I noticed it was filling the channel and inundating a fair number of trees. I wasn't thinking that it was flooding exactly, but it was full of sediment and moving fast. We stopped to grab a few pictures.

The river today was flowing at about 10,700 cubic feet per second. That would be flood stage on our own Tuolumne River, but was an unremarkable amount of water comparatively speaking. On Christmas Eve it was just over 20,000 cfs. We stopped at Miranda and had a bit of a shock. Some government entity had painted a river gauge on the bridge column to provide a bit of perspective...

You can click on the picture to see the writing better, but it essentially shows the depth of the water, which today was 14 feet deep. It's not considered to even be flooding until it reaches a depth of 33 feet, which would be a flow well in excess of 50,000 cubic feet per second. But a flood that size would be miniscule compared to what happened here in 1964; the water depth at Miranda was 46 feet, equivalent to 200,000 cubic feet per second. Downstream at Scotia where several forks of the river had combined, the water topped out at an unimaginable discharge of 752,000 cubic feet per second.

Needless to say, the damage was incredible, with entire towns being washed away. According to the Department of Water Resources, the North Coast rivers dumped 10.4 million acre-feet of water into the Pacific Ocean in six days. For comparison, Lake Powell on the Colorado River, a 186 mile long reservoir, holds 27 million acre feet. The average yearly flow of the Colorado is 14 million acre feet.

Perspective....

Happy Holidays from Geotripper!

It's a big beautiful world out there, and all I can think of for this day is to share a little corner of it with you all, and to wish you all a happy and safe holiday season in all your travels and visits. We've enjoyed a few days along the central Oregon coast, and now we are setting off on the homeward journey (through a rather exciting looking storm!).

The Siuslaw is one of the many rivers that flow out of the Oregon Coast Ranges to the sea. At Florence, the river flows through the Oregon Dunes, and the mouth of the river is the site of a constant battle between river, dunes, and waves.

The bridges of the Oregon Coast are beautiful, and from underneath some recall the ruins of Gothic cathedrals.

We didn't see a lot of sun during our visit (Really? It rains in Oregon?), but it peeked out for a beautiful sunset the other day.

For Christmas Eve, we explored along the coast a bit and found a beautiful spot where Cape Creek meets the sea at Heceta Head. There's a lighthouse hidden in the trees above the center of the photo.

Have a great holiday! Peace to all.

Watching a Slow Motion Apocalypse: The Relentless Erosion of the Sea

Now that the apocalypse is over and the world is ended we can get back to life and celebrate what is beautiful about our planet. I wasn't going to take the chance that the world would end with me sitting on a couch at home bored, so I was on the road on the northern California-southern Oregon coast during a pretty major storm. A couple of feet of snow was expected in the mountains, along with several inches of rain in the coastal areas and some very high winds. It was not a day for photography: dark skies and rain made things pretty tough. I only got a few photos that I thought were worth sharing.

We were at the Kuchel Visitor Center in Redwood National Park near Orick, California for a short break. I wandered down towards the beach (without a jacket as usual) and snapped a few shots of the sea stacks just offshore. The surf was running at 10-15 feet and maybe more, and the wind was whipping spray off the whitecaps, making for a violent geologic environment.

Large winter waves are among the most powerful of the forces in geology, capable of dislodging huge blocks of rock and tumbling them to sand in an incredibly short period of time. One can look at these sea stacks and consider how short a time they will exist before disappearing into the surf. Or...one can consider that they are the last remnants of what used to be land. Erosion is a relentless power that is continually and forever changing the face of our planet despite our best efforts to contain it.

Worried about apocalypses? It's fun to play with the concept sometimes (I love some of the Google+ and Facebook posters today), but really, it's pretty conceited of us to think that we are such a twisted generation that we get to see the end of the world. There have been plenty of people worse than us in the past, and in the future there will be plenty more. The world isn't going to end. But we do have the power to change the world into a slightly better place before we leave it. The real apocalypse is taking place slowly, one grain of sand at a time. The world will change and all things will pass away. But we have been given a short period of consciousness, and the company of many others, and we have choices about what we do with our short existence on planet Earth.

Introducing Geotripper Images: Finding Geology-Themed Digital Images on the Internet

It is just three weeks to the fifth anniversary of Geotripper (that's upper Paleozoic in Internet time). As I noted in my first blog entry, I've taken a lot of digital images and I wanted to use the blog as a way of using the pictures to educate interested people in the earth sciences. I can't believe I've written 1,100 posts, but it has been a heck of a lot of fun, and I've come to know some great people in the blog community as a result. 

As the blogs accumulated in number, I realized that although people might find the pictures useful (for school reports or research illustrations and the like), there was no good way to track them down in an organized fashion. So I got the idea of doing a separate website where my best geology pictures could be organized by subject matter or location. So, in 2010 or so I bought a domain name (geotripperimages.com; somehow geotripper.com was already taken), and immediately realized I was overmatched. I can follow a template like blogger, but faced with html and utter cluelessness about web publishing, things languished. Finally, I cobbled something together and produced an earth-science based digital image site. It is still incomplete (especially in the rivers, deserts and karst areas), but there are something over 1,000 images posted so far, and the hopefully the navigation of the site is simple enough to follow.
So I welcome you to take a look at Geotripperimages.com. So far, I have extensive sections on Volcanism, Tectonic Processes, Erosional Processes, Earth Materials, and Living Things (because every picture site should have furry or scaley animals).  The site is meant for free use by students, teachers and non-profits (see the Image Use Guidelines here). If there are authors or publishers who wish to use images in texts or other for-profit publications, we are happy to make them available at a very modest fee, royalty free. You can click on any of the pictures for a fuller view, and most are available at much higher resolution (contact us for more information).

Since the pictures are the work of myself and Mrs. Geotripper, there are plenty of the places in the world we haven't visited yet, so you might not always find what you are looking for. With that in mind, I've added a new sidebar to Geotripper called Geology and Earth Science Images. I've found seven really handy sites for collecting geology photos. I would be really happy to add some more, if you happen to host a site for such things (I'm mostly interested in sites that are mainly educational in nature). Here the sites (I can add others if you let me know if their existence):

• Allen Glazner's Geology Image Gallery (University of North Carolina)
Allan is co-author of some great "Geology Underfoot..." guides.

• Andrew Alden's About.com Landform Picture Index
Andrew Alden has been blogging about geology for longer than just about everybody, and is still going strong at http://geology.about.com//. He has put together a fine gallery of images.
• British Geological Survey Geoscenic National Archive of Geological Photographs
• Earth Science World Image Bank-AGI
Many geologists have contributed photographs to this excellent image bank (6,000+ photos).
• Geology Photos: Marli Bryant Miller
Marli co-wrote an excellent field guide to the geology of Death Valley, and has some excellent imagery at this site, including some spectacular aerial photography.
• Imaging Earth's Surface - University of Vermont
A site devoted to geomorphology images (including around 50 of Geotripper's pictures).
• NOAA Natural Hazards Image Database
• U.S. Geological Survey Photographic Library
A good place to find some of the most classic geology photos ever taken.

Happy searching!