The San Francisco Bay Area’s crazy quilt-pattern of rock formations — shaped by earthquakes — are the key to understanding the region’s landscapes. From ice-age dune sand in San Francisco to recently subsided land in the Santa Clara Valley or the veritable maze of earthquake faults in the East Bay, the geology is a fascinating blueprint of the region’s natural history.
But the pressure to exploit these resources isn’t going away anytime soon either, nor is the debate over the wisdom of doing so. As we weigh the pros and cons, a missing piece of the conversation is the land itself: What is the Monterey Formation? What is it made of and how did it get here? And what kind of habitats, plants, and animals live atop it?
The link between dry land and deep water may soon be better recognized thanks to twin efforts to link together 3,300 acres of spectacular public shoreline and to make that land part of the California Coastal National Monument, a sprawling protected area almost no one’s ever heard of.
The Monterey Shale runs through some of California's major fault lines. Could pounding the earth trigger the next Big One?
There has been so much talk of a potential fracking boom in California. But how, exactly, did the Monterey shale formation become so valuable?
What's in store for the desert species who've come to rely on an undeveloped landscape now threatened by a California oil boom?
Maybe now we'll know more about what the heck the earthquake-prone Hayward Fault is doing.
California could be on the verge of a major oil boom centered a stone's throw from the Bay Area. What does that mean for the landscape and the wildlife that call that place home?
Tim Hastings wrote to us wondering about “many large round, almost ‘dinosaur-egg’ like rocks dotting the muddy sands” when he was hiking the Estero Trail. Tim’s guess is that the soft rock is susceptible to erosive shaping during the rise and … Read more
Now that it's officially on the national park circuit, Pinnacles may be seeing more visitors as diehard national park goers add the geological wonder to their bucket lists.
Should we worry about asbestos in serpentine rock? Yes, a bit. In California, we have North America’s largest exposures. It's even our official state rock.
Independent, nonprofit environmental journalism connecting people with nature in the San Francisco Bay Area.
