Deeper Oakland: Train-Based Science
Plus zombies and some great schist
Hello Subscribers,
April brought me to two very different scientific meetings, with different rewards. The first, in Sacramento, was three days with the Geological Society of America’s large regional chapter, the venerable Cordilleran Section. The GSA sessions felt familiar: rocks, tectonics, fossils, faults and ranges. The bonus was day trips to visit faults in the Napa Valley and unusual deep-crustal rocks in the Sites area, where we were treated to the sight of St. John Mountain, whose rocks represent a former seamount plastered onto North America during the Cretaceous.
I also got to co-host a scientific session dedicated to Lake Merritt, including five talks and seven posters. You can download my slide deck PDF and talking script DOC to enjoy my talk, “Geologic Setting of Lake Merritt, the Bay Area’s Strange Attraction” at your leisure as well as a PDF of my poster, “Tectonic Origin of Lake Merritt.” Local heroes the Rotary Nature Center Friends joined us to report on the life in the water and the lake’s human history. (By the way, I’m glad to report the Nature Center is reopening after years out of action.)
The second meeting, in Baltimore, was the annual gathering of the Seismological Society of America. The three days of SSA sessions had interesting stuff from all over: ambient noise tomography, a new Korean seismic network built of cheap hardware and precision AI, dark fiber seismology, analyzing earthquakes with audio software, and that was just highlights from the abstracts beginning with “A”. The city is well served with public transit and has a rich inventory of classic buildings that reminded me of Old Oakland.
I went to Baltimore by Amtrak, so there was a special charm in a modest talk by Roger Bilham, a prominent emeritus scientist, titled “A Railway-spotters Guide to Earthquakes: Coseismic Slip, Dynamic Strain and Ground Motion Intensity” (abstract here). He and Susan Hough, another prominent emeritus scientist, have been digging in the past to learn as much as possible from historical earthquakes. They’ve done painstaking work analyzing the deadly Charleston, South Carolina earthquake of 1886. It was a historic event, the largest ever recorded in the Southeast, that laid waste to several large cities and killed 60 people, but left no fractures in the ground. The talk was based on their recent paper in the SSA Bulletin about the quake’s effect on railroads around Charleston; I’ve uploaded the paper on my site. It details a clever, forensic approach to soft evidence: old photographs printed on paper, surveyor’s notes and details of 1880s rail technology. Bilham and Hough argue that railroad evidence from old historic earthquakes can yield information useful to science. His talk was a classic arm-waver -- an interpretive dance, even -- as he enacted the forces that stretch and bend steel rails, knocking the podium mike askew and going a bit past his time limit.
The seismological society published ten news items from the meeting; browse them here for more of the variety of topics that seismology encompasses.
It was a treat to cross the continent by rail in a sleeper car. The California segment, across the Sierra Nevada and Central Valley, is great. The leg from central Utah to Denver should not be missed by any rail traveler. The meals are good and the views unforgettable.
The flight home was fast enough (after a 3-hour weather delay) but boring.
Just a century ago, you could ride a fast electric train through the Oakland Hills and Lamorinda on your way to Sacramento and beyond. The tracks of the Sacramento Northern Railway are still evident in our landscape, most notably in the Montclair Railroad Trail but also in a secret passage leading north from the end of Florence Avenue.
Events
My inaugural Lake Merritt walk last weekend was well attended, thanks to being promoted on the Oaklandside. It was a brisk afternoon that kept us from overheating, and the old tea trees lining the shore were in spectacular bloom, ready for yet another year.
I’ll schedule a repeat in June or maybe July.
This coming month begins with a walk I’m leading on Saturday May 3rd for the Friends of Sausal Creek up Castle Canyon, one of the creek’s more obscure headwaters. There’s geology to be seen there as well as human history; it’s also a possible new frontier for the Friends’ volunteer land stewards. Last I heard there are still a few openings. Sign up via this RSVP link.
On Saturday the 24th I will lead a walk through the Redwood Heights and Leona Heights areas: faults, creeks, rocks and mines. I’ve run this walk twice in late October right around Halloween; this time it should be greener and brighter with very different vegetation. Sign up via Eventbrite.
The Northern California Geological Society is having its annual dinner meeting on the 28th; our speaker will be UC Berkeley’s eminent Walter Alvarez. I got a preview in Sacramento of his talk, and it will be a wonderful look at how an experienced scientist pursues their curiosity. The registration link is on the NCGS website now. The May dinner meeting is the highlight of the NCGS year. I wrote more about the society last May.
This isn’t exactly an event, but the East Bay Regional Park District is starting its next official District Plan, “a strategic roadmap with key priorities” for the next several years. Their process starts with a survey that’s mostly a set of softball questions. Nevertheless it’s our first chance to speak up for the land.
April Blog Posts
I think I must have been inspired by the phrase “phone zombies” in last month’s newsletter because I led off April’s posts on the 14th with “Zombie rocks.” And on the 28th I posted a short explainer on “Earthquakes and engineering,” recycled (it being Earth Month) from an old article I wrote for a company that deleted it years ago.
May’s posts will come on the 12th and 26th.
You can show your support for Deeper Oakland through my Buy Me A Coffee account
Look at This
My train trip east had a leg scheduled on Amtrak’s tempting Floridian “across Indiana and Ohio, through the Allegheny Mountains into Pittsburgh, past scenic Harper’s Ferry, along the historic B&O line through the Potomac Valley to Washington” and beyond. But while I was en route a plane crash in Florida shut the line down, and I was rerouted via New York on the Lake Shore Limited. I was impressed by the new Amtrak station in New York, but wished I’d had a rock with me, my hand specimen of Manhattan Schist. I could’ve returned it.
The Manhattan Schist is so full of mica that it glitters like a Met Gala gown. Experts are still unsure of its age and provenance, but it’s roughly a half-billion years old and was probably seafloor sediment once upon a time, shed from a nearby continent. I snagged this fine fresh stone from a construction site next to the New York Times building, doing no damage to any of the city’s precious natural outcrops. Nevertheless, at the next opportunity I’ll put it back for someone else to treasure. Just one of the reasons I ❤️ NY.
Book News
I have some Deep Oakland paperbacks in hand, ready to sign for in-person buyers. The official release date is May 6, but bookstores may have them on the shelves now. I’ll also ship you a copy; details on deepoakland.com’s Donations page.
When the hardcover came out in 2023, I did a five-set-questions interview with Sam Robinson, a runner whose Substack “Footnotes” looks at the world with feet on the ground. He saw a commonality with my own walking-based approach to the landscape.
As always, thanks for reading.
Andrew