Assembling California

Feeling an earthquake may be the most California thing. There really aren't that many things that, say, Lemoore and Venice Beach have in common. Or, say, Blythe and Berkeley. People who have moved to California from other states have told me that there are ways to identify Californians. A college professor from Louisiana told me that native Californians are the only people who say "you guys" in referring to groups of mixed genders. (I was once at a meeting on the Central Coast with a bunch of other attorneys. The host kept referring to the gathering as "you all" until, at about 2 p.m., someone said, "Why are you talking like a Texan today?" The host sheepishly said, "My wife is trying to get me to stop saying 'you guys,' she says it's sexist.") An attorney from Minnesota told me that you can tell a native Californian because they always put their sunglasses on as soon as they walk outside. These things do seem pretty universal to Californians, but I'm guessing that earthquakes are more Californian. That is certainly how people from the rest of country think of California.

People who move to California seem to want to feel an earthquake or at least they feel like they've really done something if they have felt one.

There was a guy on my city league softball team who was finishing his post-doc at UCD. He's a Chicago guy originally, I think. He had been here for 7 years, 6 working on his Ph.D. and 1 on a post-doc. (He's a recovering attorney, so the man has attended a lot of school.) Before his last game with our team (he moved back East to write LSAT questions), the rest of us on the team were asking him about moving out of here. I asked him if he had felt an earthquake while he was here. He said, in a kind of sad voice, "No and I'm kind of bummed about it."

On the other hand, The Muse and I have some friends who moved to the Bay Area from Texas. They only ended up staying about a year, but, during that year, The Muse and I were up late one Friday night and felt an earthquake that felt small to us. It turned out to be about a 5.5 with a Napa epicenter. The Muse and I were wondering if our Texas friends felt it. The Muse looked at her e-mail early the next morning and the subject of The Muse's friend's e-mail was "EARTHQUAKE!!!"

So feeling an earthquake is a definite California thing. It can be really frightening and plants itself in the back of your mind. My law school was located about half a block from a major fault. Every time I went down to the lowest level of the library stacks (for some reason, all of the land use, water and environmental law books that I wanted were on the bottom floor), I always thought, man, I hope I'm not down here if that fault goes. Smaller earthquakes, though, are just an interesting experience and maybe just the smallest bit entertaining.

So, during my most recent used-book-buy-a-thon, I picked up a book called Assembling California by John McPhee. The book describes how California was created through plate tectonic motion. The main geologist who guides the author around California (and other places like Cyprus) also is a UCD professor who lives here in Carmel-by-the-Causeway, so that's cool. According to this professor, California basically was created by various pieces of other plates crashing into the North American plate over the course of hundreds of millions of years. As described, there isn't just the San Andreas, the one big fault everyone thinks of (the one that Fred Sanford used to talk about when started yelling to Lamont about the "big one"). There aren't just the smaller, but still big, faults are located near the San Andreas, the ones like the Hayward and the Calaveras. There aren't just the ones along the San Andreas that no one knows about until they go off, like the one that set off the Coalinga quake in 1983 (the biggest one that I personally have felt) and the San Simeon quake a couple of years ago.

Because California was created by lots of tectonic detritus smashing together, there are literally faults everywhere in California. There's a big fault on the east side of the Sierra apparently. There are some serious faults in the Gold Country that run under places like where Auburn Dam was supposed to be built. So most Californians feel an earthquake at some point because most Californians live near a fault of one kind or another. This was an eye-opener to me. Apparently, there are even little faults buried under the Central Valley, which I always thought didn't have any.

The reason that there are faults under the Central Valley, or the Sacramento Valley at least, is that a big piece of tectonic plate called the Smartville Block about 100 miles square that crashed into the North American plate with the center of its eastern edge someplace in Yuba County. Apparently, this thing smashed into the North American plate and the eastern edge started getting tilted up by molten magma rising up to form the Sierras. The western edge is tipped down below the Central Valley

This collison not only caused some faults under the Central Valley, but also is the reason that there is gold in California. Apparently, when the Smartville Block hit the North American plate, water got down into the fissures and, way down below the surface with heat applied, the water caused chemical reactions that formed gold. When the molten magma pushed up the Smartville Block, it pushed the gold up and it eventually reached the surface through millions of years of erosion. The magma also pushed up the beds of ancient rivers that ran where the Sierras are before the Sierras were formed. These things had gold all over them and were where the miners were getting at with the hydraulic mining hoses that washed so much sediment down Sierra rivers that, for example, the Yuba River's bed shifted about a mile north and rose something like 75 feet.

The book also explains that the Coast Range is a very recent (in geologic time) addition that was formed by another plate crashing into what had been added to the North American plate at about the same time as the Smartville Block and scraped up a bunch of miscellaneous stuff into mountains. So the Sierra and the Coast Ranges are totally different geologic formations. The book also says that the Central Valley is also totally different from each of them. In fact, it was put in place before the Coast Range, so that the dirt in the Central Valley is, for the most part, totally different from either the Sierra or the Coast Range. There are alluvial fans from the Coast Ranges and the Sierras in the Valley, but they're just the top layer of a whole lot of other stuff.

There's a lot of good stuff like this in Assembling California. The book has some downsides. It's a little like Fever Pitch in that about 30%-35% of the words in the book are pretty indecipherable to people like me who don't know much about the subject. The words that you really need to get, though, are "terrane" and"ophiolite." A terrane is a big piece of tectonic plate after it crashes into another plate. An ophiolite is the margin where a geologic piece of ocean floor has crashed into a plate and then been lifted up into the open air. It sounds like it's something like a rock onion, with a whole bunch of layers (you know, like an ogre like Shrek). Now I need to go see one of these things. Luckily, they sound like they're in places that I go for work sometimes.

I've got more than a little geek in me, so that may be why I enjoyed the book a lot. If you want to read a good collection of books about California and the West (try also The King of California, Cadillac Desert, among others), then Assembling California would be a good one.