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The Geology of Oakland - Andrew Alden author of Deep Oakland · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, Christopher Balchis.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_04: How are you doing?
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: What's up, Doc?
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: You good?
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm good, man.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: We just had a great conversation uh about a very cool book about a cool city.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: And that was very fun.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: I agree.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_04: The book is called Deep Oakland, How Geology Shaped a City.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I read it about a month ago, and I read it actually over spring break.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_04: I was in Louisiana, and this was my get up in the morning, drink a cup of coffee, and read a few chapters uh about a city and and how this it was just this great story of how geology and humanity intersect and shape decisions with us, you know, in in regards to a city.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_04: I thought it was really cool.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_04: What do I agree?
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: I agree, I agree.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, the author is Andrew Alden, he's a geologist and an early geoscience writer.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: He worked for the US Geological Survey.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, I remember the about.com days, but he was the geology writer for about.com, which was kind of interesting.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know that before our discussion.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: But a practicing geoscience writer and you know, really deeply interested and in love with the city of Oakland.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a oh yes.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the geology in this area, the Bay Area in San Francisco, Oakland Bay Area, is so exceptional that, of course, the story of the city and the the interaction between humanity and geoscience is actually super interesting as well.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: And there's there's like so much.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: I I love the descriptions of sidewalks that are sort of tortured because there's the the you know the creep going on along the fault.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I mean, it's totally amazing, right?
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: So he paints a really good picture in this book um and and sort of was inspired by the Loma Preda earthquake, which we were just talking about in our Camp Geo textbook.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: We have a whole section on earthquakes.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: In our earthquakes chapter, you can go there, geo.campcourses.com, and in our earthquakes chapter, we talk about the Loma Prida earthquake.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: We have a couple images we made about the Loma Prida earthquake, and that was kind of the inspiration for Andrew's sort of geoscience writing about Oakland.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_04: I did let you get away with one.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_04: I was gonna rip on you, but it was right away at the beginning of the interview.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_04: And because you weren't even alive during the Loma Parita earthquake in 1989.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, you you weren't even a thought at that time.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: I was, Chris.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: I was two, just so we know.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: I was two.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: No way.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: Are you serious?
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: I uh yeah, I'm an 87er.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my gosh, so just why don't you just you were alive?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't you just calm down, man?
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know what?
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: I was gonna rip on you because you were alive in 1868, the last time the Hayward fault ruptured or whatever that he was talking about.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: So shut up over there.
• 2:39
  unknown: Okay.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_03: That uh score one for you.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um Jesse Love Chris is pretty good.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: Zero.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: Here we go.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh one more thing about Andrew.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: He also has a blog which kind of inspired in many ways this book, and it's Oaklandgeology.com.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I spent a lot of time on that blog.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's super interesting.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: He's got amazing photos.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: If you're ever traveling to the Bay Area, I would recommend going to this thing and just searching out cool geoscience stuff because he's going to the blog, you mean the blog or the book, you know, in the book as well, because the book's kind of a a bit of a more structured version of the blog, maybe.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: But the blog is really informative.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of great pictures, and it you can kind of do a little tour, as he said, with Google Earth and the blog.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a really great resource.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd point people to that as well.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, reading the book definitely made me want to go and visit Oakland.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_04: I want to see it through this lens.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was compelling.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_04: All right.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_04: Well, hey, here we go.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_04: Deep Oakland, Andrew Alden coming your way.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_04: Here we go.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_04: All right.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_04: Well, welcome, Andrew.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_04: It is so nice to finally meet you.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_04: How are you doing today?
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_04: I'm having a great day so far.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I bet you are.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_04: This is your release day.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_04: That's right.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_04: This is a big occasion.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this is the day the bookstores are actually authorized to lay the copies out on the shelves and in the in the front windows.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: I saw one of those, took a picture.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: I had an autographing session this morning, and they said uh they sold 25 copies this morning in one hour.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: We've interviewed several authors on Planet Geo, and this is the first time we've ever interviewed somebody on launch day.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: So that's very exciting.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: I did notice on your blog that you've been uh putting copies in you said you've been putting copies in the little the little book, uh what are they called?
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: The the mini libraries in like the telephone booth mini libraries and neighborhoods and stuff.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's just such a cool idea.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: I want to ask you about that.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: But uh, but Chris, you got our like leading questions, so uh go for it.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_04: I do, I do.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_04: So, Andrew, Jesse and I each have this uh, I don't know, kind of involved story about how we discovered geoscience or fell in love and it was this like moment where it just kind of smacked us across the face and said, This is the direction you're going.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_04: Um, very like very important times in our lives.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_04: Did did you have a moment like this where you you knew I'm going into geology and I'm gonna follow this as far as I can go?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I I knew before I went to college I'd be a theology major simply because I've always had a fascination with landscape.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I've lived in interesting places.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm basically a Californian, but I was raised in the East.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: I've lived in Maryland, I've lived in New Hampshire, I've lived in New York, down to New York City, and went to school in New Hampshire when I graduated college with just a BA in geology, you know, it's not much.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Some people think you need to get a doctorate or a master's, and those are great things.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: You really don't need to to get a lot of satisfaction and even a career out of geology.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, after I graduated, I had this uh job lined up in California with the U.S.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: Geological Survey.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so I drove across country, me and my cat in my little car all stuffed with stuff.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I went through Wyoming, and I went through Idaho, and I went through Oregon, and I drove down through California, and that trip has just seared itself into my mind, you know, ever since that, you know, you have embarked on a really cool life path.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's that's a really good way to put it.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: And uh Chris, before Chris makes the joke, we both agree here you don't need a PhD to have a degree.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: If you have a PhD, you're a little bit overeducated, uh, speaking from somebody who has one of those uh degrees.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um that it's an interesting point.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: So how did you know?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: I because I think it's kind of rare to go into college knowing that you want to be a geologist.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: So how did you know that?
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: That because that that's quite rare.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like most people find it, you know, in year three or two of college and they kind of take the earth science class and say, oh wow, this is cool.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to be an engineer or pre-med or anything like that anymore.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, how why did you know but when you went in?
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: For one thing, I was a boy scout and I got the geology merit badge.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: I I also got the oceanography merit badge.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: For a while I wanted to be an oceanographer.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: And that's perfect a good ambition, but it's uh you really need an advanced degree to do that.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: But but meanwhile, it's I'm basically a hilltop, mountaintop kind of guy.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: I love climbing hills and looking around and just wondering about what I'm seeing.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so I've always it it just seemed natural.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now, my high school actually did have a geology course, but I never took it.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_04: Wait a minute, wait a minute.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_04: What what does that mean it didn't work out, Andrew?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_04: Come on, you're gonna have to do better.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: I was taking I was taking other advanced placement courses.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: I took advanced placement chemistry and physics and biology and so on.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Never got around to geology.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Huh.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I I don't know it's that is unusual, but you know, high school geology courses are unusual, and I'm sure we can talk a lot about that.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah, they they for surely are, and so are the people that teach them.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's Chris Chris is one of them.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um I uh it's really interesting path.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh usually most people uh you know either have to take the class in in high school or have to take a class to sort of understand that geology is useful.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: So that's an interesting path, uh kind of a unique path.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_04: That's a yeah, that's a really good point, Jesse.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_04: Most people are in something else and they take a geology class because they have to, and then they realize this is awesome.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_04: I'm changing directions.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_04: And Andrew, you just jumped right in.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_04: Um, yeah, very different path.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we really, really and and everybody in the profession knows this.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: We really need more high school geology because geology is a this is the perfect STEM discipline.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: It touches everything else.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: They say mathematic physics is the king of sciences and so on.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: They say it about mathematics, but I think geology is the original science.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe astronomy too, you know?
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because ever since we were wandering around on Savannah, we were aware of what rocks are good for, what soil is good for, what water, landscape, and so on are good for.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's certainly not biology, Chris and I have a long-standing um sort of animosity with biology.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: But let's just level set the why we're having this conversation.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: We will alluded to it um about a book launch.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: The book is called Deep Oakland, How Geology Shaped a City.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: And Chris and I have both read this book.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: You can find it today, as of today, uh, in bookstores, or if you're in Oakland area, you can find it in little libraries around the place, I suppose.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: But and the e-book is out too today.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, excellent.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I you know, this was a really interesting for me, a really interesting, you know, the intersection between geology and and city infrastructure and and human humanity really.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's something we often gloss over.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I teach intro to geology, the big physical geology class.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of the entrance into the field of geoscience for a lot of people.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: Give us a how did this idea come about?
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and you know, writing the book or or maybe it started with your blog that you have as well.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like, can you give us the the sort of origin story of this topic?
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, Andrew, before you answer this, I just want to clarify this because I think in geology, all three of us, uh, you know, we fixate on the rocks, we fixate on the scenery, and that's what we that's the story we want to tell, right?
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_04: But your story was way different, and I had really enjoyed that in the book.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_04: So that's what I'm interested in.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_04: Because how did this idea come about where I'm gonna tell both?
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_04: You know, it's just not doesn't seem natural to geologists to do this.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I guess I'm I'm not a conventional geologist.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm uh as I say, I was a uh a technical editor, a scientific editor.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: So I had to know the literature, I had to know how to talk to research scientists.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: It was like a graduate level education after I got my bachelor's degree.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: So for years, my first years, I was kind of a book geologist.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, I c I could talk a good game, I understood their concepts, I could speak the language.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: But for a long time, um I didn't look around me.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then I moved to Oakland and two weeks later the Loma Prieta earthquake happened.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: It just it kind of jolted me away.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then I looked around Oakland.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Oakland is a beautiful city.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you've ever been there.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of people have been there without really realizing it because if you could been to San Francisco, you look across the bay, and you know, San Francisco is beautiful because it has a view of Oakland.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know?
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: This beautiful range of hills on the other side of the bay.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then it spreads out into this beautiful plain, this coastal plain.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's paved with homes and a nice downtown and so on.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's a beautiful city.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then I was lucky enough to have available uh and all of us do, because it's a publicly available geologic map of the uh northern East Bay, including the Oakland area.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so I downloaded that.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: It came out in the year 2000 and started looking at it, and it was a crazy quilt of rock units.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: Plus the Hayward Fault runs right down the middle of it, runs right through Oakland.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_04: Andrew c for our listeners, can you describe what the Hayward Fault is?
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the Hayward Fault is the San Andreas' fault sister.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the the two faults are part of several.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: They span about sixty, eighty miles from east to west.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: And they define the edge between the North America Plate and the Pacific Plate.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: So the Hayward Fault is the same kind of fault that the San Andreas is.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: It last ruptured the ground in 1868 when Oakland was just a little village by the bay, and it hasn't ruptured since.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: And when we look at its history, it erupts an average of every 150 years, plus or minus like sixty years.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not a uh steady drum beat, it's got a terrible rhythm.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's always a next beat.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so at some point, uh you know, do you all just know this and we live with it?
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: I live with it every day.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I log on every morning, one of the first things I check on my browser is the USGS earthquake server, and I just look at California and there's little dots all over it.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: So, Andrew, what is the capability of the Hayward fault?
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: It could relieve itself in a magnitude seven earthquake.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's not quite as big as the one in 1906 in San Francisco because it's not as long a fault.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have as much rock surface to store energy and release in it.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: But seven is just is bad enough.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: We we talk about the big one, we talk about San Francisco in 1906 and Southern California in eighteen eighteen fifty-seven and so on.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: The Oakland upcoming Oakland earthquake, I call it the great earthquake of 20x.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: It will be not the big one, it'll be the big enough one.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: It'll be bad because Oakland and the whole East Bay grew over the fault without really knowing it was there.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Where now the San Andreas Fault doesn't run through San Francisco.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: It runs offshore.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there was no sign of it when they built San Francisco.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: It was an accident of history that Oakland grew over the fault before we even realized what was there and what it meant.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't even know that until the 50s.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: So we were we were poised for something awful.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the missions, one of the big messages in my book is we need to get to know where we are, because where we are is who we are.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: The city will be defined many years from now by how it handles that inevitable earthquake and how we prepare for it beforehand.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that I mean it's a really sort of I guess this intersection is really an interesting point to look at.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: And there's obviously the earthquake part, uh, which you've just touched on beautifully.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: There's also the the sort of broader geology, and I think you describe it in the maybe the prologue, as you know, when you open up the your eyes to the world around you and to the geology around you, you really get a deeper experience of the place you're in.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: So the feedback between your blog posts that you've written for it looks like quite some time and this book.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how did you come about to the idea of, oh, actually, I have to write a book about this?
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it it it looks like can you kind of give us the framing for like the motivation for writing a book and this interaction between the blog?
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's sometimes it it seems that seems like maybe the opposite direction I would expect to go.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it all began in 1997.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: This was in the early days of the World Wide Web when this outfit they called themselves miningco.com.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: They said, we're going to start this website and we're going to hire hundreds of writers, and each one of them will be a specialist.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: They'll build this educational site in their specialty.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, you know, this sounds like a real cool opportunity.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so I uh signed up to be their geology guide.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: I was one of the founding members of MINECO, and then it became about.com.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, really?
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, interesting.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: And um today it is now Thought Co.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it's changed a great deal over the years.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: It changed a whole lot.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: But I spent 17 years there writing hundreds, pr uh probably thousands of different little items.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: And and that was, you know, I talk about working at the USGS as a technical editor.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's one kind of education.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the other kind of education is what I did for those 17 years, starting in 1997.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: And in 2007, I was going, you know, I I I'm looking around, I need to start a blog too, because there's all the stuff I want to write about Oakland that isn't important enough for the rest of the world.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: And my very first post was a picture of um a road cut up in the hills where it's all serpentine, all serpentine rock, and it's slippery stuff and it's falling down, and there was all this, you know, wreckage in the road, and a brand new house is rising right on that land.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, you know, the people in Oakland need to know what what's around them.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: So that was 2007, and I just did it for a while having fun.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually I started doing a regular thing once a week, and I thought at some point, if you blog enough, you can build a book, you know, just take all the posts and pour them in a pour them into a big file and turn it into a book.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't work that way.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_04: Can I interrupt you about it?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_04: Um you you talked about serpentine.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_04: Jesse and I absolutely love serpentine.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_04: Uh we've collected some on the on the eastern part of the United States before.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_04: But the what is it and what's the significance to your point in terms of you know Oakland?
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot to say about serpentine.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: Serpentine uh is California state rock.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, that's really interesting.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: What it is, it's a metamorphic rock.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's a metamorphic rock.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's what happens to the basaltic lava that that the kind of rock that the ocean crust is made of.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it's what happens to that rock when it uh is subjected to boiling hot sea water deep down underneath the Earth's crust under the ocean.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: It alters all the minerals into these hydrated magnesium silicates, and they're very slippery minerals.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: They change color from black to greenish, uh bluish, and they're these slippery fibrous minerals.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: But it also is important for the for the earthquake faults in California.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: It it appears along many of them, and it seems to act as a lubricant.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: And another thing it's important for in California history is the mother load up in the Sierra Nevada foothills, which hold all of the gold that launched the gold rush, the gold mines up there.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: You look for serpentine when you're prospecting for gold.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a a rich part of California history, and it's just a neat thing to look at wherever you are.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um I I know you don't have any in Michigan.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: I know you have some in Pennsylvania here and there.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: We've got a we've got a lot of uh these sort of serpentine um, well, serpentinite and and various ultramafic and my mafications.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_04: And and it's neat neat biology.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_04: Well, there's no such thing, Andrew.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_04: Um Jesse, wait a minute.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_04: You've been holding out on me.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_04: Where's the serpentine at?
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's kind of where I'm at right now in the southeast side of Pennsylvania.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: There's some uh ultramafic lenses uh and nodules that are kind of crop up, and there's there's a little bit of debate about whether there's actually pieces of the mantle part of the oceanic crust, but there's definitely oceanic crust, slivers of it caught up in the the the the sort of higher grade terrains to the east of well, southeast Pennsylvania and eastern Pennsylvania.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: So is it pretty?
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: It is pretty up on the blue range.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_04: It's pretty.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_04: So why have I not known about this?
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like you know, you you haven't been invited to visit me in Pennsylvania.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's my point.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: That is my point.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly right.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so Andrew, I want to go back to the book.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: So you okay, you got a blog, you got all these blog posts.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, you got them in folders somewhere, and you're thinking, okay, I'm gonna put them into a book, but uh it's lo and behold, it's not as easy as that.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: So that didn't that didn't work.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I started so so I started over, I said, I realized you're gonna have to write a whole book, and so I did it my way.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, oh, the kind of book I want to read, which has turned out to be a very nice manual for geologizers for people who want to learn about the different kinds of rocks.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the uh and so it it really did get into rocks at that point.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: And um that's why I kind of finished it up and then I looked around for a possible publisher and and they looked at it and said, Um, how about you write something else?
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: That goes that that goes into these other themes that you keep bringing in about uh how human history and geologic history interact.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Oh, that sounds sweet.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna do that.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I put the old one down, which is still still publishable.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: And uh wrote the new one.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: Took a couple years.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that was uh, that's interesting.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_04: That was one of the things I wanted to know is how long this process took.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_04: But Andrew, I look, the thing that I really really liked about the book was the way that you weaved in the humanity to it.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_04: And so can you just share one of your Favorite examples of how Oakland, humanity, and geology intersected.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_04: Like pick one of your favorite intersections here.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_04: That's a hard question.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there are there are several, but um I think one neat thing is I learned, I had really no idea is that the place Oakland was founded on, you know, when the first Americans showed up in this former Mexican territory that that the United States won from Mexico in 1848, a couple of guys rode over across the bay from San Francisco in 1850 and said to themselves, This is kind of cool, this this site.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's not like every place else in the East Bay.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: There's there's some rocky places and there's some swampy places.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: But this is different.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's got a this shelf here.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: We could actually start a town here.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: We could uh start a harbor here, we could build our own city.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: It wouldn't have to be San Francisco, wouldn't have drunk staggering around and uh this the the uproar.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we could have wealthy people like ourselves could have this nice place over here.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, that shelf they saw is actually the same kind of sand dune that also covers most of San Francisco.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: San Francisco is a pretty lousy place for a city.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: The only thing it's good for is the seaport because the s there's the soil is poor, it's windy, it's foggy, uh there are no trees there.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: There they're there And the and the view of Oakland as well, right?
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's what El San Francisco is good for.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: It was the Contra Costa, the opposite coast, they called it.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: The Contra Costa Range.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: And um there was good soil over here, and uh like I say, it had this uh shelf, it was covered with oak trees.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: It was a beautiful grove of mature oak trees that the local tribes, the the Ohlone Indians, had been tending for thousands of years, you know, f as they say, since the beginning of time.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: They had tended it for a corns, they would set fire to the underbrush every now and then to clean it up and so on.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so it looked beautiful to these Americans.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: But it's actually a sand dune from the height of the last ice age.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: And when you think about what the Bay Area was like at the height of the last ice age, it was totally different.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: This is 20,000 years ago.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: The ocean was 400 feet lower at the time.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: There was no San Francisco Bay at all.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was a valley.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was a valley of all this freshly exposed glacial sand from the Sierra Nevada, and the Ice Age winds were even stronger than the fog that you feel in San Francisco today, and it blew sand all the way over here and built up this big bed of it 60 feet thick.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: That was cool to learn that.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: I did not know that before I launched into this project.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: And and wherever you dig in it, there isn't a single pebble in it.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: Really pierced interesting.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this is not like the glacial outwash you have in Michigan or New England where I went to school.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: This is it's pure sand.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's like uh hourglass sand.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: And and whenever you see a building you know downtown, they dig into it, I go, Whoa, I just want to put my hands.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, definitely.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I I I want to touch on one other another aspect of your book that I really enjoyed was sort of your descriptions of your your walks around Oakland, which I have a a couple, a two-parter here, if you'll allow me, a two-part question.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: So when you go on these walks, uh, you know, even today, presumably, you still sort of do these, um, uh what do you take with you, I guess, to experience them?
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then a lot of our listeners are not from Oakland and probably won't be able to experience, you know, the full the fullness of this thing.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they should definitely buy the book because it's a great read, but they won't be able to experience everything.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: So if somebody you know came to Oakland and said, Andrew, I want to go on one of your geology walks and geologize with you, which one are you going to take them on?
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: Again, a tough question.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: I do want to take exception to your premise that really enjoy Oakland unless you be there.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: You could do it in Google Maps.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great point.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great point.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: You can you can visit anywhere in the world in Google Maps.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you can even geologize in Google Maps.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's a reader from outside town, you know.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: I I name I name streets, I name places.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: You can show up and, you know, look in Google Maps.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's true.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: That that's a fair point.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's a fair point.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: No, what I do, I do a lot of solo walks.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I just get out, move my legs, to revisit sites and so on.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: And what I carry with me, I don't carry a rock hammer.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: I used to at first, and then I realized, you know, what one, you don't need to do it because you're not doing research.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: And two, you don't need it because the rocks are just beautiful by themselves.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: I want to leave them alone.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I take with me is I still have my acid bottle.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: You all keep a little bottle of little hydrochloric acid right now.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_04: Of course.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_04: Every every self-respecting geologist has a little bottle of HCL with them.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: I do that.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: I've got a little hand lens, I've got my phone, my camera, and I've got a little umpire brush that you use, you know, the one you see them brushing whole plate.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: I I use that to for cleaning out crops.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: Want to get a good look at them and to take pictures.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: And everybody should have all those things.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: They you don't really need the acid bottle, but I just have not been able to leave it behind.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's such a neat little tool.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_04: So, Andrew, are you wearing your hand lens around your neck?
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, do you have a little shoestring that you I I have a lanyard, but it's it's inside my bag, so I don't wear it.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: I don't use it that often.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, because I know what I'm looking at by now.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe for building stones, I would I would pull it out and look at it.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah, that's that's true.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_04: That's true.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_04: I do that all the time when I'm in any big city like Chicago, I do the same thing.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_04: Andrew, so I was struck with an idea.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_04: Um, you're familiar, of course, with the series Roadside Geology or you know, Geology Underfoot.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_04: This book made me really think of that because I couldn't help think about my city, Grand Rapids, or Detroit, or really every major city in the US or anywhere for that matter, and how geology played a role in why that city's there and you know the city's personality.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_04: And first of all, I I think that that it's a great idea.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_04: This should happen.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_04: Now I want to know.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_04: I want to know more about my city, but I want somebody else to do that for me.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_04: So I can just read it.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I don't I don't have I'm lazy.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_04: I don't have five years of my life to devote to writing a book to this at the you know on this subject at this time.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_04: But so one, I think that's a great idea, and I think you need to figure like figure out an angle in this, Andrew, because you're the first one that's done something like this, at least that I'm aware of.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and the first that I'm aware of, too, although there are some Yeah, you I any city, any city large enough to support uh uh uh you know enough readers for a publisher to be interested in could do this, you know.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: Seattle, there's a there's a writer in Seattle, uh David B.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: Williams, who's very good in geology, but he's also into biology.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, there's that word again and human history and everything else.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: So he's all it he he covers all of nature.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: I don't, I focus on geology.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: Someone could do it for San Francisco, someone could do it for Los Angeles and Chicago.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh in fact, there is uh I just heard today from a uh Emeritus professor who's working on a geoheritage book for Chicago, and it's got the makings of it.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, before this interview, I actually went on Google Maps and took a look around Hudsonville, Michigan.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_04: Well, okay, I want your thoughts here.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: You've got stuff there.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: You've got stuff to Hudsonville.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm not if I'm not mistaken, you've got a uh a lost ice age course of the Grand River going through there.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_04: Oh yeah, oh for sure.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_04: So Hudsonville has Hudsonville has the the old glacial Grand River that which when the river shifted course, that quickly turned into some of the best soil on the planet that we call muck.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_04: It looked gorgeous.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_04: It's amazing.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_04: You can grow anything on that stuff.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_04: That's really wow, I'm I'm impressed.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_04: I I am very impressed.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's obvious from the air, you know.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: Knowing what we know about Michigan, you can figure it out.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: Having grown up in Michigan, I will say the geology in the Bay Area is exceptional.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you have world-class geology everywhere there.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I must say, I I you know, Grand Rapids would be an okay read, probably, but I think we should not downplay the quality of geology that's in the Bay Area.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's world-class geology.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: Let's let's just leave it at that.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: And you you cover it very well in your book.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I I just I need to make that point.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's Grand Rapids could have a nice pamphlet.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: There we go.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: There we go.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's uh it's a nice, a nice pamphlet.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's got it's got the rapids themselves because it's a um geuro lithologic transition in the Michigan basin.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_04: But then we decided to dam it, and so now we don't have any rapids running through Grand Rapids.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_04: But there that's that might change.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_04: There's a push.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: There must be there and besides there are there are localities to the side, to either side.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, like what?
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm really curious about that.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: And they're all quarries.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, okay.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_04: And and so what did you think of all the lakes?
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_04: Because you don't have that in Oakland.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_04: Were you impressed by our lakes?
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_04: Oh yeah.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my gosh, we cannot dive down this rabbit hole.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: Chris is gonna start.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: Chris is gonna start banging out about how great Michigan is again.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: I I just we can't go too deep down in this rabbit hole, guys.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna have to pull us out.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's not it's not quite yeah, it's not quite up to Minnesota, but it's definitely.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_04: Oh my gosh.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_04: Oh no.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_04: All right.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_04: Well, this interview is over now, Andrew.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um Wow.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: All right, Chris, you're done.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a good point that like we don't and I I've um thought about this since reading your book a bit and and reading the your blog, about how to integrate this style of thinking a little bit more into the introductory geoscience education, because you know, we're at a point where geology is in geoscience is more important than it maybe has ever been, at least a basic understanding of how our planet operates.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we don't do a great job, and there's always room for improvement in the sort of communication aspect of how important this stuff is.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: So books like yours are really great for pointing out that even in just one, it's not a small city, but in one location, there's all this interaction into the the geoscience has controlled a lot of the the kind of human development and human history of the area, which is really great.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: So, real quick, can you summarize the geologic history of Oakland?
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: I know this is gonna be difficult, and we're not asking you to read the book here because like that would be it's it's too much.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: There's so much, but like I don't know, you or maybe not really in the history of it, but just like what are some things?
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: What are your favorite chapters in the book?
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: Or or because you kind of organize the book by geology of specific parts of Oakland.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_04: Um this is kind of like asking you to real quick summarize radiometric dating, Jesse.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, no, it's an impossible task, for sure.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_04: For sure.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: So let's let's buckle in for four hours here.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: This is a long episode, uh listener.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, tell us how the continents form.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: Super easy.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know that that's that's your line of of research, and it's uh it's a really important one.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's a real cutting-edge stuff.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: I love reading about it.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, you know, when I moved to California when I came west and or I moved back to California in the 70s, I took took a lot of time to travel all over the state, and so it's a very active state.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: California is the mountains rising and earthquakes happening and plates moving.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I realized that almost all of it has examples and traces here in one place or another within the city of Oakland, from, you know, young volcanoes to ancient subduction zones.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: So how did Oakland, this one little corner that's got everything that California has, how did it form?
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, California formed the same way.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: It used to be a big old subduction zone, just like along the coast of Indonesia, Java and Sumatra, just like that, only with a with a continent behind it.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: There really isn't a a good example in the world today of how it was.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, maybe in South America, it was kind of like South America today, for a very long time, an unusually long time for subduction zones.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then everything changed and it got ripped apart sideways, and which was lucky for geologists because it broke it all apart uh into pieces and arranged them all on the surface where we could study them and kind of fit it all together at at at depth and on the surface, and from the oceanic side to the continental side.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: So two things, the the subduction zone to breaking it up, and that's how the coast range got wrinkled up, like pushing out of the edge of a bed sheet.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: And then uh later on we have the ice age cycles, which are so important everywhere in the United States.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it was fun for me to realize how important it was, even in this uh uh active place of California.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: You would think you'd think it would erase all that stuff, but it was all superimposed on it.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the history of Oakland in three episodes reduction, transcurrent, disruption, and then glacial up and down cycles.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: It I mean it the the geology there is just cannot be overstated, really.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's so cool.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's an amazing um bit of rock that tells this amazing history of really complicated tectonic forces.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: So uh very good.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: It it it was just so rare to find it all in one city.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I realized I made the boast well, I first realized it about 10 years ago.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: I said Oakland it has more rock types in it.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you wanted to build a collection of shale and sandstone and siltstone and dolomite and churr and so on, you could build a bigger collection within the city of Oakland than you could anywhere else in the United States.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I think, and no one has proven me wrong yet.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_04: So, all right, Andrew, a little off topic then, outside of Oakland.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_04: What is your favorite place in California then?
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_00: There are so many, you know, Death Valley, Yosemite, Lassen.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_04: See, that's that's where I was the leading question, because that's really what it is.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: The great the Great Beach is Point Rey is north of San Francisco, the Antelope Valley.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_04: Wait a minute, where's the Antelope Valley?
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_04: I don't think I've ever been there.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: The Antelope Valley is just north of Los Angeles.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: You go through the through the hills, and it's the western edge of the Mojave Desert.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's the western point of the Mojave Desert.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I love it because it right now, this time of year, its entire valley is paved with California poppy.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, beautiful.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_01: And there's an epic poppy bloom going on right now because of all the rain.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: Oh man.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I love driving I fly through the Central Valley because you can see mountains all around you when you look away from the roads.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, that's right.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_04: That's right.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_04: I've I've spent a lot of time in California.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_04: I do love the state.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_04: I think I prefer the northern part of California.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_04: You touched on you know, Shasta and and Lassen and those areas.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_04: Um, they're just it's uh it's a it's a beautiful, beautiful state.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_04: I'll give you that.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_04: Um, not taking away anything from Michigan or Hudsonville, but it's a beautiful state.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well well, like I say, Hudsonville's got that abandoned river course, you know, and that's a really cool thing.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: It is.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_04: It's you know, Andrew, the thing is, is and you're right, it is a really cool thing.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_04: You know, Hudsonville is called the Salad Bowl City because we can grow anything here, but I don't think a lot of Hudsonville people realize that that's why we have the muck.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_04: And that's really the takeaway with your book.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_04: I think that the people of Oakland are particularly going to love this book.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_04: I know I would.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_04: I know I'm a little biased.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_04: I loved it.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_04: I've only spent, you know, a little bit of time in Oakland.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_04: I to be I'm I know this is gonna offend you, but I s tend to spend more time in San Francisco.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know why, but this makes me want to go to Oakland.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_04: Honestly, it does.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_04: It makes me want to walk the city.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_04: I want to see the things that you talked about.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I want I do want visitors to do that, and I do want people in Oakland to discover it for themselves.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, you you read this book and and you can tell it's written for local people.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: I don't explain a lot for outsiders.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: I do that in the beginning.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: I just when I talk about Telegraph Avenue or whatever, people here know where that is.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like I say, the book doesn't have to have everything between its covers.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: Nowadays, people can look up stuff, they can go and Google maps.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: I don't need to explain all of geology, I don't need to explain limestone.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_00: I thank goodness I don't need to talk about the Precambrian, I don't need to talk about it he just ripped on Precambrian talk about it.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's true, it's true.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't need to doesn't need to cover it.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_04: Um, Andrew, so to your point, I spent a lot of time actually looking things up because I wanted to, I felt the need as I'm reading it to get my bearings of the city.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_04: So I did actually spend a lot of time on Google Maps looking around.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_04: Um, you know, I wanted to understand Lake Barrett.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_00: That is a virtue of this book.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_00: It I want my readers to be curious.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not trying to lay it all out for them because that's too much.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's too much to digest.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: So, Andrew, I and I forgive me if I missed this.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't actually, I'm just thinking of this now.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: Your comment about how the diversity of rock types that you have within the Oakland city limits.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: Is there eclogite in any of these like knockers that are there?
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: I I I love eclogite.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: It might be the single like most important rock type.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: So this is a leading question.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: Is there eclogite?
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_01: Either yes or no, I don't care.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: But what is your favorite rock that is in Oakland?
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: You're a funny guy, Jesse.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: There is eclogite in little high grade blocks up in uh Joaquin Miller Park, and uh it's mainly a serpentine zone, but there are hard grade blocks.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's got your classic garnet glaucophane shifts.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: So it's in there in these knockers that are coming up in the melange kind of uh kind of area in the surpassing.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, hold on, hold on, Jesse.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_04: Listen, you you have to okay, define why you're asking about eclogite, please.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_04: And what the hell is a knocker?
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_04: Uh you just went through a bunch of words that you need to define maybe first.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, okay, eclogite first.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: We talked about this last week, Chris.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: We talked about slab pull as a plate tectonic mechanism, and eclogite being this dense anchor.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why I'm I like eclogite for the physical perspective.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: But eclogite's also a really beautiful rock.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know, bright green pyroxene and deep red garnet.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: Really, really beautiful rock, Christmas tree rock.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then knocker is the other thing.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: And knocker, they're these big, they're just basically big blocks of a variety of stuff that's caught up when the subduction zone system, kind of the this thrusting like can kind of have stuff that's from deep down in the subduction zone system make its way up to the surface in this what we call melange system.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_01: And you get big blocks of chert and big blocks of blue schist and eclogite and all sorts of crap kind of caught up in this mess.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: And it's all the the sort of gr ground mass of the rock.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's ground mass of the region, I guess, is all kind of sheared and lots of serpentine and all sorts of random micas and stuff like that, and these big knockers that are caught up in it as well.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_01: So they're called knockers because and you have some great photos on your blog, Andrew, of these sort of big boulders kind of caught up in the landscape.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's one of a golf course that I saw that looked really, really cool.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's a beautiful picture of a knocker.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh forgive me if I'm not remembering that correctly, but yeah, they're too small to map, but they're too big to ignore.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's well put.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well put.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_01: Really well put.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, and then your favorite rock.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm your favorite rock.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: We're asking you a lot of these hard favorite questions, Rennie.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know why we got on this train, Jesse.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: I I think it would have to be the ones I keep on my bookshelf are I have some hunks of serpentine and I have some hunks of peritotite that I got up on the Klamath Mountains.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: We did we actually have peridotite in Oakland too.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: But peritotite is the original rock.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's the original stuff.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's the stuff that turns into serpentine.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so I have some of that too.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: I I also have a piece of uh volcanic tuff that I got up on the Sierra.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: These are rocks I collected from outside town.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I don't keep any, I don't keep a lot of rocks from Oakland.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: I try and I try and put them back up.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_04: I I you know I appreciate that.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_04: That that came across in your book.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_04: Um, in fact, one of your professors had a big influence on you.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_04: I can't remember exactly the quote, but it had to do with collecting rocks, especially in visible areas.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was a field trip, you know, up in the Smartfield complex, and which which is another subduction complex, much older.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: He he told us all, you know, this is really important.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's an unusual location, this locality, this road cut.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I went up, I was just gonna I have my my umpire's brush with me, and I was gonna brush off the rocks.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, you know, please, please leave it alone.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I take classes of students here every year.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_00: We we come here all the time, and you know, if everybody Did what you're doing, it it would just be wiped out eventually.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think he was exaggerating, but you know, there is a kind of cowboy amateur geologist, a young geologist, a student geologist.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: They want to hit everything with a hammer.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I know.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_00: You just can't do that.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: You you have to grow up, make do with what you have.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: Unless you have a really serious professional interest in rocks, you should not be hammering them.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I know what you're saying.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_01: When we uh in all of our field trips that we run, and I'm sure Chris, you do the same.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, we haven't talked about this, but we have to be very careful about which uh outcrops we actually take, you know, a whole slew of a couple hundred undergrads to over a week.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: And because yes, there's a lot of just random bashing for no real reason.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_00: I I remember the kid I used to be, you know.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we all sort of used to be that's what we used to do.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_00: You go around on go around on your bike and you know, if you have a hammer, you use it on everything and go, wow, what's that look like?
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_04: Speaking of which, Jesse, do you remember the pillow basalts that I took you guys to behind menards in Marquette?
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_01: Famously behind menards.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: Hammers left in the bus is the rule, right?
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, they are gone.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_04: They're gone.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_04: Menards wanted to expand their outdoor lumber yard, and they dynamited away these gorgeous uh meta basalts.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_04: Just uh such a shame.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_01: What a bummer.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_01: What a bummer.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, we had to leave our hammers in the bus on Crisple Heis' trip for that outcrop for sure.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, we we do a big we just go to a highway outcrop that's full of nonsense limestone, in my opinion.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: It does have some bentonites in it, but you know, students can just hammer away at it.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's like whatever, no big deal.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: But we have to be very specific about you know not taking them to just around the bend where there's actually something really interesting there.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_01: Put the hammers in the bus, and then we walk over there after they've had their fill of hammering on the rocks that that uh don't matter so much.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Andrew, I we really are appreciative of your time, and it was really great reading your book, and I'm really appreciative of you kind of joining us on Planet Geo here.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_01: And you we'll put a link to uh in the show notes to where people can can find this book.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: But we always close our interviews with one sort of final question, which is what has been your best day as a a geoscientist or uh as an author in your case?
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think my best moment as a scientist was when I figured out why there is a a big water gap in Oakland.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: We have a water gap in Oakland too.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's you know, that's a classic of Pennsylvania.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: You think oh the Appalachians and water gaps.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_00: We've got a great example in Oakland, and I realized it's not a textbook one.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_00: So someone had to come up with a creative story to explain it.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_00: And when I realized that it took a long time to put together, that that was a sweet moment.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_00: I work up to it in the book, you know.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's it's kind of animate.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's a really key piece of evidence and a cool thing in chapter six.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, that that's cool.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_01: So when was that realization?
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_01: Was this during the writing of the book or during in your blogging days or it was right at the beginning.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, cool.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, write writing a book really forces you to think things through.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so I thought it through in really good detail at that time.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: And and next month I'm gonna give a talk to my local geological society.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_00: And if any of them wants to shoot me down, then you know they they're free to try.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_00: But I think it's a very good hypothesis.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's great.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that's all we you know, you know, that's geology is a lot of hypotheses, and a lot of them are just stories.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how they start, and so that's my hypothesis.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_00: So it'll take some graduate student to figure it out in the future if they care to.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's you know that it's it's geology is a lot of stories.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we have these these conversations as well about you know, what's the value of a geoscience degree, you know, to to students and stuff.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, it's quite broad value because of this really crazy three-dimensional, four-dimensional thinking that we train students on.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: You have to visualize stuff in three dimensions in space and then moving over time, but not just any time, over millions and billions of years.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's a really creative and actually becoming quite a data-rich science.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a really unique style of thinking that geology requires.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that that's a great one.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's a really good uh best day.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: Where do you remember where you were sitting when you're like, oh, the light bulb goes off, and oh wait, this might be it.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I need to pursue this idea.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have that sort of emblazoned in your memory?
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_00: No, I was probably just sitting right here at my keyboard, just putting it together.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's a that's a great day.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_04: Well, Andrew, thank you so much again.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_04: The book is called Deep Oakland How Geology Shaped a City.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_04: It's a just a great read.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_04: Highly recommended.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Andrew, for your time.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: Really appreciate it.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for joining us on Planet Geo.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's been a pleasure.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_00: Anytime.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_00: Anytime.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know, maybe I'll run into you.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm hoping to attend GSA on Pittsburgh.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, Jesse, I'll bet you'll be there.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know about you, Chris, but it'll be neat to run into the state.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, yeah, definitely.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um definitely reach out.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_01: We'll have a whole slew of Penn State people as you know, it's home turf.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_01: So all the students and undergrads, and I think my whole research group is keen on going.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_01: So there, yeah, we'll I'll definitely be there, shepherding students around, I'm sure.
• 49:12
  unknown: Cool.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're at AGU in December, I'll definitely be there.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: I've been uh attending AGU since.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, nice.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's I I am uh excited that it's back in San Francisco.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_01: I guess the the sort of Muscone Center is back up and uh in and operating.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I don't know if I'm not sure what my uh my schedules will be, but at one of the coming up AGUs, one of these years we'll we'll meet up, if not at GSA in Pittsburgh.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_01: That'll be great.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh thanks again, Andrew.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_01: This has been a real pleasure.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_01: And we'll see you in Pittsburgh.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, that's a wrap.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: You can find all of our past episodes, transcripts, you can subscribe, you can support us.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_01: We always appreciate that at our website, planetgeocast.com.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: Send us an email, planetgeocast at gmail.com.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: We are continuing to put together office hours episodes here, answering your questions and building episodes off of suggestions that you've sent us.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_01: So keep that up.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to learn all the basics of geoscience, Chris, we've put together what we're calling a conversational geology textbook, geo.campcourses.com.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_01: The first link in your show notes, go to that.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: Got some cool images.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna actually be updating the web app pretty soon and sort of making the interface a little bit more functional.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_01: So we're excited for that.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_01: Go check it out and let us know what you think.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: Cheers.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: Peace.