Homepage ... Columns from 2000 ... 1995-1999 Column Index

Article for: The Davis Enterprise
Date: February 13, 2004
Author: Kimberly Bernick

THE TRUE NATURE OF THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY

The San Francisco Bay: expansive, immense, and ... temporary? Temporary is not a word generally heard in descriptions of the bay, yet according to Doris Sloan of UC Berkeley, in a geological sense, that is exactly how the bay should be described. 

On Tuesday, Sloan will be present "The Geology of the San Francisco Bay: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow" as part of Explorit's Cutting Edge of Science Lecture Series. The free lecture is scheduled to take place at the Davis Branch Library at 7:30 pm. 

Sloan, bearing a B.A in sociology, a M.S in geology and a Ph.D in paleontology, has spent the last 28 years teaching and researching different aspects of geology at UC Berkeley.

In her talk, Sloan will share with her listeners "the many surprises the San Francisco Bay has to offer, such as how very young the present bay is and how the valley that today is the bay has been a grassy valley for most of the time over the past half a million years." This fact alone may be surprising to most people. It seems difficult to imagine that the large expanse of water known as the San Francisco Bay could ever disappear, let alone believe that for most of geological history it has not even been there. 

So how do geologists discover these interesting happenings of the past? 

"We learn about the secrets of the bay by studying cores drilled down into the mud," explained Sloan. "The skeletons of the organisms that lived in the mud also can tell us about the characteristics of the bay at the time they lived." Listeners at Sloan's talk can descend with her deep into the muddy bottom of the now present bay to discover exactly how the core samples and organisms are analyzed, and how such an astounding description such as temporary is proven to be fitting for the intriguing bay.

Not surprisingly, drastic climate changes have occurred over the years in many regions of California outside of the San Francisco Bay. Davis has experienced its fair share as well. Sloan's lecture will also reveal some local climate changes that have taken place right here in Davis, as well as what a different environment California may have been as a whole in the distant past. 

Attendees will receive a peek into the past geological history of the San Francisco Bay, Davis, and the state of California, and quickly discover that what seems like a steadfast landmark in the landscape of California may really be just a momentary accessory on the ever-changing earth. 

Explorit's Cutting Edge of Science Lectures are sponsored by Novozymes Biotech and are hosted by the Davis Branch Library.

-----------------------------------------------------

Explorit Science Center is at 3141 5th Street in East Davis. The current exhibition is "Get a Clue: Solving Mysteries With Science," which continues through March 7. Public hours are Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Tuesday through Friday from 2 to 4:30 p.m. For more information, visit www.explorit.org or call Explorit at (530) 756-0191.