Assembling California
by John McPhee
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Book Summary Information
Author: John McPheeEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1994-02-01
ISBN: 0374523932
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Reviews of Assembling California
Book Review: "The summit of Mt Everest is marine limestone"
Summary: 5 Stars
Geology has always seemed to me very boring in the abstract. It's only when confronting the awesome geological forces like, for instance, those that made the mountain ranges of North America does my curiosity intensify. This book probably does as good a job as any could in transporting the reader imaginatively into the field - to California especially but other parts of the globe as well - in an attempt to decipher how this very recent theory in human history, this theory of plate tectonics, works. It would have been helpful if there were included a glossary of terms, an index, and better maps and diagrams. But the writing is very descriptive with interesting insights. It tells of Eldridge Moores, a geologist at the forefront of making sense out of plate tectonics, who grew up in a mining community on an Arizona mountaintop. In the course of his life, he made the transition from a life based on the mindset of extracting whatever you can out of the earth without much concern for the consequences to one with a very careful consideration of resource utilization and sustainability.
Plate tectonics is a very recent theory in geology and the history of mankind, analogous in importance to evolution in biology and relatively in physics. From what I gather from this book, there is much yet to explain, but also much progress that has been made. In looking back over my college textbook (from the 70s), I see that it has a chapter on plate tectonics and related subjects, but this new theory had yet to be widely applied. The old, inadequate explanations of mountain-building were still in place. For example, the rise of the Sierra Nevada is still explained in terms of geosynclines. It is hard to believe now that for a long time geologists had the idea that the local pressing down of sediments in the Central Valley actually caused the uplift of the Sierra.
One of the important aspects of plate tectonics is sea-floor spreading, which occurs when two plates come together on the ocean floor and new ocean crust is formed from the mantle. Ophiolites is the name applied to the rock that results. In taking a cross section of the ocean crust, the top layer is composed of horizontal sediments of ocean detritus, but then below, extending down to the mantle, are vertical and parallel layers where the rock has hardened as it rose from the crust and was shoved along the ocean floor. The question, to which the theory of plate tectonics has a much better answer than anything in the past, concerns how these ophiolites wind up on the top of mountains.
One of the sub-themes of the book, which should be of some concern to at least a few who live along the San Andreas fault or other faults, is the crossing of geological time with human time. The fact that Los Angeles and San Diego are moving north along a transform fault (San Andreas Fault) and will one day be north of San Francisco and out to sea is generally realizable only in geological time. It's largely a continuous process that only amounts to a displacement of a few inches a year, but occasionally pressure will build and a significant displacement will suddenly occur. The Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, which had horrifying consequences and caused much damage, is an example when geological time suddenly erupts into human time.
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