Moving and Shaking in the Bay Area

Catalog description

The Bay Area looks settled, but the ground under it is anything but. The San Andreas runs a few miles from campus, the hills around Stanford are still rising, the Pacific is steadily cutting back the coast, and hillsides give way after every wet winter. This seminar asks how all of that works. Why are there mountains here at all? Why does the ground move suddenly along some lines and not others? How do you use direct observations to let your mind's eye see what happened to the area over millions of years? The part that surprises most people is that the same machinery that produces earthquakes capable of leveling cities is also what makes this such a beautiful and varied place to live. The faults that rupture are the faults that build the mountains, and those mountains determine the details of the Bay Area's microclimates. That is why you can drive half an hour and pass from redwood forest to oak savanna to chaparral. The microclimates and the ecosystems they support are not separate from the hazard. They are the same story told over different timelines. We answer these questions outdoors. This is an in-person, field-based seminar, and every week we go somewhere within about an hour of campus: along the San Andreas, out to the San Mateo coast, up into the Santa Cruz Mountains, and into neighborhoods where the ground is actively sliding. You will learn to read maps of various types, measure the orientation of rock layers with a compass, and tell the difference between a landscape that is being built up and one that is wearing down. Back on campus we connect what we saw to the plate tectonic processes driving it. You do not need any background in earth science. Most students arrive having never looked closely at a landscape and leave able to read the stories they tell. The work is a handful of problem sets and an open-ended final project on a place or question you…