Why John McPhee’s Assembling California Is Still the Best Book on California Geology
John McPhee’s Assembling California, written with geologist Eldridge Moores, explains how the state was pieced together by plate tectonics. Here’s why it’s still the book to read, and what’s changed since.
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California has inspired a lot of great science and nature books, from John Steinbeck’s “The Log from the Sea of Cortez,” about marine biology, to Mary Austin’s “The Land of Little Rain,” a lyrical look at the California desert, not to mention the late Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, the epic history of California’s fight over water. (I’ve read it twice.)
But for the state’s geology, its mountains, its coast and especially its faults, nothing beats John McPhee’s “Assembling California”. It’s part of his Pulitzer Prize-winning series, “Annals of the Former World,” and it tells the story of how California was built, piece by piece, in a way that’s actually fun to read.
McPhee is one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He’s been a staff writer at The New Yorker for decades and has written more than 30 books, and he has a gift for taking subjects that sound boring, like rocks, oranges or freight transportation, and making them gripping. He does a staggering amount of research and writes about it in clear, often beautiful prose that a lot of writers have tried to copy. I’ve read several of McPhee’s books and while some of the work can be hard going, I’m usually very satisfied once I’m done. Assembling California is, in my opinion, one of his best.
Here’s an excerpt:
An old VW bus is best off climbing the Sierra from the west. Often likened to a raised trapdoor, the Sierra has a long and planar western slope and—near the state line—a plunging escarpment facing east. The shape of the Sierra is also like an airfoil, or a woodshed, with its long sloping back and its sheer front. The nineteenth-century geologist Clarence King compared it to “a sea-wave”—a crested ocean roller about to break upon Nevada. The image of the trapdoor best serves the tectonics. Hinged somewhere beneath the Great Valley, and sharply faulted on its eastern face, the range began to rise only a very short geologic time ago—perhaps three million years, or four million years—and it is still rising, still active, continually at play with the Richter scale and occasionally driven by great earthquakes (Owens Valley, 1872). In geologic ages just before the uplift, volcanic andesite flows spread themselves over the terrain like butterscotch syrup over ice cream. Successive andesite flows filled in local landscapes and hardened flat upon them. As the trapdoor rises—as this immense crustal block, the Sierra Nevada, tilts upward—the andesite flows tilt with it, and to see them now in the roadcuts of the interstate is to see the angle of the uplift.
John McPhee in Assembling California
The Sierra Nevada, the spine that runs down most of the state, is at the center of the book, and it’s a textbook example of the forces that build mountains. (We’ve written and will continue to write about them.) McPhee explains how plate tectonics shaped it over millions of years, and he gives you a real feel for how old and restless the Earth is.
A brief bit about the man: Born in 1931, McPhee studied at Princeton University and Cambridge, and his writing straddles diverse topics from basketball to nuclear energy. His real strength is weaving hard science into stories about people. (There’s always an interesting character at the heart of his work.) That’s earned him a long list of honors, including the Pulitzer Prize.
John McPhee (Wikipedia)
Assembling California follows McPhee as he travels the state with the late geologist Eldridge Moores of the University of California Davis, working through California’s geology from its earthquakes to its strange rocks. There’s an excellent excerpt in a 1992 issue of the New Yorker.
Moores was a big deal in geology. Born in 1938 in Phoenix, he spent most of his career teaching at UC Davis, where his research helped build the case for plate tectonics, especially in his adopted home state. Moores also held the position of President of the Geological Society of America in 1996. He had boundless energy, but his real gift was being able to look at a jumble of rocks and “see” the history in them. Students loved him. Moores died in an accident on a field trip in Greece in 2018.
Eldridge Moores - UC Davis
Moores explains to McPhee how the Sierra Nevada range didn’t just emerge from the Earth’s crust, as geologists long thought. Instead, the building blocks bubbled up from faraway rifts in the ocean floor called “spreading centers,” then transported thousands of miles on moving plates and piled up onto the North American continent.
Sierra Nevada Mountains and Owens River (Erik Olsen)
Faults, especially the San Andreas, are the other big theme. McPhee makes you feel what it means to live on ground that’s always moving, if too slowly to notice, and his accounts of past earthquakes, and the ones still coming, are vivid. You’ll learn a lot about what’s going on under your feet.
San Andreas fault and the Carrizo Plain
It’s not all rocks, either. McPhee works in gold prospectors and winemakers, because you can’t tell the story of modern California without the resource-driven economic narratives that run through it. We try to do a lot of that in this magazine.
If you want more after McPhee, try Simon Winchester’s “Crack at the End of the World”, about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Winchester, a British journalist and popular science writer, mixes geology and human drama the way McPhee does. It’s also a very fine book.
San Francisco earthquake
A lot has changed since McPhee wrote the book in the early 1990s. Tools like LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), which uses lasers to map the ground in incredible detail, along with better seismometers and satellites, let geologists see things McPhee and Moores couldn’t.
We’re still learning how the state literally came together.
Newer studies of the San Andreas, for instance, have sharpened estimates of how often big earthquakes hit and what sets them off. A 2022 study from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory looked at a section of the fault that slowly “creeps” instead of sticking and slipping. Creep was thought to bleed off stress and lower the risk of big quakes, but the study suggests that segment may be building up stress after all, which could mean bigger earthquakes than expected.
Not exactly good news, but it’s always better to know what’s happening, and McPhee was a master at helping us understand the way the world works.
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