Californians live on the edge . . . of a tectonic plate, that is. In this geologically tenuous location, where a tsunami, earthquake, or volcanic eruption is just another hazard, the rocks and landforms are dynamic too. From erupting geysers and boiling mud pots to collapsing sea arches and crawling landslides, California is a land in motion. In fact, rocks on the west side of the San Andreas Fault have moved northward nearly 200 miles in the last 20 million years. With lively prose and beautiful photographs, California Rocks! explores sixty-five geologic sites at parks and other publicly accessible places. Learn why so many saber-toothed cats were preserved in La Brea Tar Pits, how hollow tubes formed in the flowing lava of Lava Beds National Monument, and what forms the big waves at Mavericks surf break.

At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults. The two disparate time scales occasionally intersect—in the gold disruptions of the nineteenth century no less than in the earthquakes of the twentieth—and always with relevance to a newly understood geologic history in which half a dozen large and separate pieces of country are seen to have drifted in from far and near to coalesce as California. McPhee and Moores also journeyed to remote mountains of Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where rock of the deep-ocean floor has been transported into continental settings, as it has in California. Global in scope and a delight to read, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands.

Part 2 contains lists of types, cotypes, paratypes, and figured specimens (plesiotypes) of vertebrate fossils, paleobotany and plant fossils, and records of various mineralogical and geological materials.

This most complete guide to Northern California features sites from the Oregon border south to San Luis Obispo. Beautiful color photographs showcase the specimens that can be found at the sites described. Detailed text and maps make locating collecting areas easy.

Gold districts of California