Beneath the seemingly calm and serene landscape of the Eastern Sierra in California lies one of the planet’s most explosive features โ a volcanic giant that has been slumbering for thousands of years. It’s the Long Valley Caldera, a vast geological structure that stands as a testament to one of the most violent volcanic eruptions in Earth’s recent history.
The caldera sits in the Owens Valley, situated between the towering peaks of the Sierra and the older, but majestic White Mountains. It is renowned globally for its volcanic history. Situated about 3000 miles north of Los Angeles, the Long Valley Caldera was born around 760,000 years ago during a cataclysmic eruption that ejected an estimated 150 cubic miles of material. It was a massive eruption, one of the largest in North American history. To put this into perspective, the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens released just about 0.3 cubic miles of material, indicating the colossal magnitude of the Long Valley eruption.
The aftermath of this gigantic eruption formed a vast depression, or caldera, measuring about 200 square miles. This is not a necessarily a unique event in Earth’s history, as there are many similar calderas worldwide, one of the largest in the world being in Yellowstone National Park. What makes the Long Valley Caldera distinctive is the incredible geothermal activity that continues beneath the surface, reminding us of the latent power it holds.
Inside the caldera, one discovers a geological wonderland that resembles a surreal moonscape, with its otherworldly terrain, bizarre formations, and strikingly barren features. Hot springs and fumaroles, areas where volcanic gases escape from the ground, are scattered across the area. This dynamic geology can be seen at nearby Mammoth Mountain itself, a lava dome complex located on the caldera’s rim. The area also holds an intricate hydrothermal system, with ground temperatures at depth reaching boiling point and more. On April 6, 2006, three members of the Mammoth Mountain ski patrol tragically lost their lives after falling into a volcanic fumarole near the summit. The incident happened while they were conducting safety operations to secure a snow-covered geothermal vent following an unprecedented snowfall.
Over the next several hundred thousand years, the Long Valley Caldera experienced a series of volcanic eruptions, including the formation of several domes and lava flows. The most recent eruption occurred about 600 years ago, creating the Inyo Craters, a group of small cinder cones located on the western edge of the caldera. If you spend much time up in the Eastern Sierra, you will discover that there are fascinating volcanic features everywhere.
One of the most notable features of the Long Valley Caldera is the presence of a magma chamber beneath the caldera floor, located at a depth of about 5 to 10 kilometers (3 to 6 miles), with deeper zones of partially molten rock extending down to 20-30 kilometers (12-18 miles). The magma chamber is responsible for the ongoing geothermal activity in the area, including hot springs and geysers, such as the famous Mono Lake Tufa State Natural Reserve.
The Long Valley Caldera is one of the most active volcanic sites in the United States. Here, the Owens River flows through it, winding south through Owens Valley.(Erik Olsen)
Volcanism in the region is relatively recent, and it remains extremely active today. Upon entering the town of Mammoth Lakes, there is a small, but steep rise to the East. This area, called the Resurgent Dome, has also uplifted about 80 cm (about 2.5 feet) since 1980.
The current tranquillity of the Long Valley Caldera might deceive the casual observer into thinking that it poses no danger. This assumption is not entirely true. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) closely monitors the caldera due to its high volcanic risk.
In 1980, the region experienced a swarm of strong earthquakes, arousing concern among geologists about possible renewed volcanic activity. Since then, seismic activities have been routinely observed, along with ground deformation โ indications that magma might be accumulating underneath. Scientists recently tried to take the temperature of that lava. Here is a more detailed discussion of Long Valley Calderaโs deep and shallow hydrothermal systems.
Sierra reflected in Little Alkali Lake near the Long Valley Caldera (Erik Olsen)
The Long Valley Caldera and Mammoth Mountain are classified as “High Threat” volcanoes by the USGS. The primary concerns are volcanic eruptions and the release of harmful gases, such as carbon dioxide, from the ground. At Horseshoe Lake, near Mammoth Mountain, high concentrations of carbon dioxide escaping from the soil have led to tree die-offs, as the gas displaces oxygen in the root zone. Such an eruption could disrupt local communities, cause significant economic impact due to damaged infrastructure, and affect air travel by releasing ash clouds.
The scenario might seem dire, but it’s crucial to understand that the chances of a massive eruption like the one 760,000 years ago are extremely low. Most potential future eruptions are likely to be smaller events, possibly similar to those experienced at the Mammoth Mountain area.
In addition to its volcanic history, Owens Valley also played an important role in the history of California. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the valley was the site of a major water rights dispute between the city of Los Angeles and local farmers and ranchers. The city ultimately won the dispute, and the water from the Owens River was used to fuel the growth of Los Angeles, leading to the displacement of many local residents.
The Long Valley Caldera continues to be a focal point for scientific research and natural wonder. Ongoing studies are uncovering new details about its volcanic past, current geothermal activity, and future potential for eruption. As we deepen our understanding of this dynamic landscape, we also gain valuable insights into the natural processes that shape our world and the potential impacts of climate change. It’s amazing to think that there is so much fascinating geologic activity right here in California, so close to LA. Whether through scientific discovery or personal exploration, the Long Valley Caldera offers a unique window into the powerful forces that govern our planet.
It started by asking one of the biggest questions of them all: how old is the earth?
One might think that we’ve known the answer to this question for a long time, but the truth is that a definitive age for our planet was not established until 1953, and it happened right here in California.
Some of the earliest estimates of the earth’s age were derived from the Bible. Religious scholars centuries ago did some simple math, synthesizing a number of passages of Biblical scripture and calculated that the time to their present-day from the story of Genesis was around 6,000 years. That must have seemed like a really long time to people back then.
Of course, once science got involved, the estimated age changed dramatically, but even into the 18th century, people’s sense of geologic time was still on human scales, largely incapable of comprehending an age into the billions of years. In 1779, the Comte du Buffon tried to obtain a value for the age of Earth using an experiment: He created a small globe that resembled Earth in composition and then measured its rate of cooling. His conclusion: Earth was about 75,000 years old.
But in 1907, scientists developed the technique of radiometric dating, allowing scientists to compare the amount of uranium in rock with the amount of lead, the radioactive decay byproduct of uranium. If there was more lead in a rock, then there was less uranium, and thus the rock was determined to be older. Using this technique in 1913, British geologist Arthur Holmes put the Earthโs age at about 1.6 billion years, and in 1947, he pushed the age to about 3.4 billion years. Not bad. That was the (mostly) accepted figure when geochemist Clair Patterson arrived at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena from the University of Chicago in 1952. (Radiometric dating remains today the predominant way geologists measure the age of rocks.)
By employing a much more precise methodology, and using samples from the Canyon Diablo meteorite, Patterson was able to place the creation of the solar system, and its planetary bodies such as the earth, at around 4.6 billion years. (It is assumed that the meteorite formed at the same time as the rest of the solar system, including Earth). Subsequent studies have confirmed this number and it remains the accepted age of our planet.
Patterson’s discovery and the techniques he developed to extract and measure lead isotopes led one Caltech colleague to call his efforts “one of the most remarkable achievements in the whole field of geochemistry.”
But Patterson was not done.
In the course of his work on lead isotopes, Patterson began to realize that lead was far more prevalent in the environment that people imagined. In the experiments he was doing at Caltech, lead was everywhere.
Clair Patterson at CalTech (Courtesy of the Archives, California Institute of Technology)
โThere was lead there that didnโt belong there,โ Patterson recalled in a CalTech oral history. โMore than there was supposed to be. Where did it come from?โ
Patterson’s discovery was “one of the most remarkable achievements in the whole field of geochemistry.”
Barclay Kamb, California Institute of Technology
Patterson was flummoxed by the large amounts of environmental lead he was seeing in his experiments. It seemed to be everywhere: in the water, air and in people’s hair, skin and blood. Figuring out why this was the case took him the rest of his career.
He found it so hard to get reliable measurements for his earth’s age experiments that he built one of the first scientific “clean rooms”, now an indispensable part of many scientific disciplines, and a precursor to the ultra-clean semiconductor fabrication plants (so-called “fabs”) where microprocessor chips are made. In fact, at that time, Patterson’s lab was the cleanest laboratory in the world.
On the occasion of Clair Patterson receiving the Tyler Prize. The Tyler Prize is awarded for environmental achievement. (Courtesy of the Archives, California Institute of Technology)
To better understand this puzzle, Patterson turned to the oceans, and what he found astonished him. He knew that if he compared the lead levels in shallow and deep water, he could determine how oceanic lead had changed over time. In his experiments, he discovered that in the ocean’s oldest columns of water, down deep, there was little lead, but towards the surface, where younger water circulates, lead values spiked by 20 times.
Then, going back millions of years, he analyzed microscopic plant and animal life from deep sediments and discovered that they contained 1/10 to 1/100th the amount of lead found at the time around the globe.
Smog in Los Angeles in 1970. (Courtesy of UCLA Library Special Collections – Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive)
He decided to look in places far from industrial centers, ice caves in Greenland and Antarctica, where he would be able to see clearly how much lead was in the environment many years ago. He was able to show a dramatic increase in environmental lead beginning with the start of lead smelting in Greek and Roman times. Historians long ago documented the vast amounts of lead that were mined in Rome. Lead pipes connected Roman homes, filled up bathtubs and fountains and carried water from town to town. Many Romans knew of lead’s dangers, but little was done. Rome, we all know, collapsed. Jean David C. Boulakia, writing in the American Journal of Archaeology, said: โThe uses of lead were so extensive that lead poisoning, plumbism, has sometimes been given as one of the causes of the degeneracy of Roman citizens. Perhaps, after contributing to the rise of the Empire, lead helped to precipitate its fall.โ
In his Greenland work, Patterson’s data showed a โ200- or 300-fold increaseโ in lead from the 1700s to the present day; and, most astonishing, the largest concentrations occurred only in the last three decades. Were we, like the Romans, perhaps on the brink of an environmental calamity that could hasten the end of our civilization? Not if Patterson could help it.
California Institute of Technology. Credit: Erik Olsen
That may be far too grandiose and speculative, but there was no doubting that there was so much more lead in the modern world, and it seemed to have appeared only recently. But why? And how?
In a Eureka moment, Patterson realized that the time frame of atmospheric lead’s rise he was seeing in his samples seemed to correlate perfectly with the advent of the automobile, and, more specifically, with the advent of leaded gasoline.
Leaded gas became a thing in the 1920s. Previously, car engines were plagued by a loud knocking sound made when pockets of air and fuel prematurely exploded inside an internal combustion engine. The effect also dramatically reduced the engine’s efficiency. Automobile companies, seeking to get rid of the noise, discovered that by adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline, they could stop the knocking sound, and so-called Ethyl gasoline was born. “Fill her up with Ethyl,” people used to say when pulling up to the pump.
Despite what the Romans may have known about lead, it was still an immensely popular material. It was widely used in plumbing well into the 20th century as well as in paints and various industrial products. But there was little action taken to remove lead from our daily lives. The lead in a pipe or wall paint is one thing (hey, don’t eat it!), but pervasive lead in our air and water is something different.
After World War I, every household wanted a car and the auto sales began to explode. Cars were perhaps the most practical invention of the early 20th century. They changed everything: roads, cities, work-life and travel. And no one wanted their cars to make that infernal racket. So the lead additive industry boomed, too. By the 1960s, leaded gasoline accounted for 90% of all fuel sold worldwide.
But there signs even then that something was wrong with lead.
A New York Times story going back to 1924 documented how one man was killed and another driven insane by inhaling gases released in the production of the tetraethyl lead at the Bayway plant of the Standard Oil Company at Elizabeth, N.J. Many more cases of lead poisoning were documented in ensuing years, with studies showing that it not only leads to physical illness but also to serious mental problems and lower IQs. No one, however, was drawing the connection between all the lead being pumped into the air by automobiles and the potential health impacts. Patterson saw the connection.
Ford Model T. Credit: Harry Shipler
When Patterson published his findings in 1963, he was met with both applause and derision. The billion-dollar oil and gas industry fought his ideas vigorously, trying to impugn his methods and his character. They even tried to pay him off to study something else. But it soon became apparent that Patterson was right. Patterson and other health officials realized that If nothing was done, the result could be a global health crisis that could end up causing millions of human deaths. Perhaps the decline of civilization itself.
Patterson was called before Congress to testify on his findings, and while his arguments made little traction, they caught the attention of the nascent environmental movement in America, which had largely come into being as a result of Rachel Carson’s explosive 1962 book Silent Spring, which documented the decline in bird and other wildlife as a result of the spraying of DDT for mosquito control. People were now alert to poisons in the environment, and they’d come to realize that some of the industrial giants that were the foundation of our economy were also having serious impacts on the planet’s health.
Downtown Los Angeles today. (Erik Olsen)
Patterson was unrelenting in making his case, but he still faced serious opposition from the Ethyl companies and from Detroit. The government took half-hearted measures to address the problem. The EPA suggested reducing lead in gasoline step by step, to 60 to 65 percent by 1977. This enraged industry, but also Patterson, who felt that wasn’t nearly enough. Industry sued and the case to the courts. Meanwhile, Patterson continued his research, collecting samples around Yosemite, which showed definitely that the large rise in atmospheric lead was new and it was coming from the cities (in this case, nearby San Francisco and Los Angeles). He analyzed human remains from Egyptian mummies and Peruvian graves and found they contained far less lead than modern bones, nearly 600 times less.
Years would pass with more hearings, more experiments, and the question of whether the EPA should regulate leaded gas more heavily went to U.S. Court of Appeals. The EPA won, 5-4. โManโs ability to alter his environment,โ the court ruled, โhas developed far more rapidly than his ability to foresee with certainty the effects of his alterations.โ
The Clean Air Act of 1970 initiated the development of national air-quality standards, including emission controls on cars.
Drone over Los Angeles. (Credit: Erik Olsen)
In 1976, the EPA’s new rules went into effect and the results were almost immediate: environmental lead plummeted. The numbers continued to plummet as lead was further banned as a gasoline additive and from other products like canned seafood (lead was used as a sealant). Amazingly, there was still tremendous denial within American industry.
Although the use of leaded gas declined dramatically beginning with the Clear Air Act, it wasn’t until 1986, when the EPA called for a near ban of leaded gasoline that we seemed to finally be close to ridding ourselves of the scourge of atmospheric lead. With the amendment of the Clean Air Act four years later, it became unlawful for leaded gasoline to be sold at all at service stations beginning December 31, 1995. Patterson died just three weeks earlier at the age of 73.
Clair Patterson is a name that few people know today, yet his work not only changed our understanding of the earth itself, but also likely saved millions of lives. When Patterson was finally accepted into the National Academy of Science in 1987, Barclay Kamb, a Caltech colleague, summed his career up thusly: “His thinking and imagination are so far ahead of the times that he has often gone misunderstood and unappreciated for years, until his colleagues finally caught up and realized he was right.”
Clair Patterson is one of the most unsung of the great 20th-century scientists, and his name deserves to be better known.
The Bekins Warehouse following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake
When the 1906 earthquake struck San Francisco, most of the buildings at the time in the city were made of wood (like redwood harvested from the once vast stands of coastal redwood that grew in Northern California). This did not bode well for San Franciscans because immediately after the earthquake, a series of fires spread quickly over the city, largely razing to the ground almost every wooden structure that withstood the tremblor.
But curiously, a few structures did survive largely intact. Among them, are the Old United States Mint (also known asย The Granite Lady) and a half-finished warehouse built for the Bekins Van and Storage Company at Mission and Thirteenth. Although the brick facade cracked, the interior steel framing remained intact, according to a U.S. Geographical Report issued in 1907.
Rebar – used for steel reinforced concrete – being used in a high-rise building.
The Bekins warehouse survived because it was made of a relatively new material that had largely been ignored (and vigorously opposed) in California. That material is reinforced concrete, and its use in this instance played a crucial role in demonstrating the practicality and benefits of reinforced concrete in large-scale urban buildings around the world.
A problem with concrete is that it has great compressive strength. It can withstand high pressure without cracking. But it lacks tensile strength, meaning it cannot bend without shattering. Throughout the late 1800s, various builders tried to strengthen concrete with metal, mostly iron. With the advent of steel, which was becoming increasingly cheap to manufacture, and with a new technique based on twisting the metal to allow it to adhere better to the liquid concrete, a new era of construction was born.
US Mint Building in San Francisco
In the years before the 1906 earthquake, the use of concrete was resisted by the legions of bricklayers, masons, and powerful builders’ unions that saw the material as a threat to their survival. Others called the material ugly and not worthy of a great city like San Francisco.
One trade publication at the time wrote: โa city of the dull grayness of concrete would defy all laws of beauty. Concrete does not lend itself architecturally to anything that appeals to the eye. Let us pause a moment before we transform our city into such hideousness as has been suggested by concrete engineers and others interested in its introduction.โ
The resistance against concrete was formidable enough that the material was not used widely in the city. Even after the earthquake, it took a while for people to grasp its value. Despite the overwhelming evidence that this new building material could dramatically help a city not only withstand an earthquake but fire as well, San Francisco building codes still forbade the use of concrete in high, load-bearing walls.
The Bekins Warehouse itself was designed to serve as a storage building and office for the Bekins Van and Storage Company, a firm specializing in moving and storage services. The choice of reinforced concrete was strategic, as warehouses of the era required robust structures that could withstand the heavy loads associated with storage, as well as offer protection against fire, a common hazard in densely packed urban centers.
Moreover, the use of reinforced concrete allowed for the construction of large, open interior spaces without the obstruction of support columns. This architectural freedom not only facilitated the efficient organization and movement of goods within the warehouse but also allowed for the adaptation of the building to various uses over time.
San Francisco today. Unsplash: Jared Erondu
It wasn’t until two years later, in a contentious San Francisco board of supervisors meeting, that the city changed its building codes to allow the widespread use of reinforced concrete. By 1910, the city had issued permits for 132 new reinforced concrete buildings. The science of building advanced hugely in the wake of the disaster.
As urban areas continued to grow and evolve, the principles demonstrated by the construction of the Bekins Warehouseโsuch as the emphasis on durability, fire safety, and spatial efficiencyโbecame increasingly central to architectural and urban planning philosophies. The building not only serves as a testament to the innovative use of materials and techniques in early 20th-century architecture but also as a precursor to modern construction practices where reinforced concrete remains a fundamental building block.
Today, most every tall building in the world makes use of steel-reinforced concrete. The survival of the Bekins building was transformational for not only the city of San Francisco but in many ways, it heralded a watershed moment in the history of architecture, construction, and the planet’s cities.
Itโs not every day that you can drive down the highway and personally witness one of the great tectonic collisions in Earthโs history. But, if you happen to be motoring along Highway 14, the Antelope Valley Freeway, towards Palmdale near Santa Clarita, there they are: great slabs of rock stretching skyward at steep angles out of the dirt and scrub brush, creating dramatic formations that seem otherworldly.
This is Vasquez Rocks, one of Californiaโs most interesting and dramatic geologic formations.
In a way, the rocks are otherworldly. Widely used as a setting for Westerns and space dramas, they have been seen in more than 200 films and television shows. But this is no ordinary set, erected for a few months and taken down. Vasquez Rocks have taken shape over 25 million years, erected through the violent, but slow, tectonic forces of two continental plates crashing into one another. This is near the top of the San Andreas Fault, at the juncture of the North American and Pacific continental plates.
Vasquez Rocksโ tallest peak juts 150 feet above the canyon floor, offering spectacular views to those courageous (or foolhardy) enough to scramble up itโs steep and treacherous face. (Iโve done it. Many times) The fact is, though, that the rock above ground is like an iceberg. The rock below extends an extra 22,000 feet into the earth.
Credit: Erik Olsen
Over the last half-century, Vasquez Rocks have been a stage for episodes of the TV series โStar Trek: The Next Generation,โ โStar Trek: Voyagerโ and โStar Trek: Enterpriseโ as well as the films, including โStar Trek VI: The Undiscovered Countryโ and J.J. Abramsโ 2009 โStar Trekโ reboot. They served as part of the planet Vulcan landscape, home to Spock. Abrams said that the site was chosen in homage to the siteโs use in the original, including the classic episode of the original Star Trek series โArenaโ which pit Kirk against an ambling, hissing, intelligent lizard creature on a foreign world.
The original Star Trek TV series made use of Vasquez Rocks as an other worldly setting. ๏ฟผ
Thereโs a reason that Vasquez Rocks is so often chosen as a set. The site lies at the edge of whatโs known as the Thirty Mile Zone, a region around Los Angeles and Hollywood where those in the Screen Actors Guild and technical crew can report for work without paying higher premiums which dramatically increase the costs of production.
Named for Tiburcio Vรกsquez, a notorious California Bandit who used the formation to elude officials in 1873-1874, the rocks have made it a favorite filming location going back to the Saturday-morning westerns of the 1920s and โ30s like โThe Texas Rangerโ in 1931 and โThe Girl and the Banditโ in 1939. Other, non-Star Trek productions include the 1994 film version of โThe Flintstonesโ and โThe Big Bang Theory.โ
Most people are aware of the rocksโ fame in cinema, but its geological history is in many ways even more interesting. Vasquez Rocks sit astride or are near several other faults. The Elkhorn Fault, an offshoot of the San Andreas Fault, runs right through the Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park, administered by LA County. Other faults, such as the Pelona, Vasquez Canyon, Soledad, and San Gabriel Faults, all lie near to the formation, making it a boon for geologists hoping to better understand Californiaโs geological and seismographic history.
(Hikers: It should also be noted that the site also serves as a small section of The Pacific Crest Trail.)
The rocks consist mainly of sandstone that accumulated over millions of years from the erosion of the nearby San Gabriel Mountains. Rain, landslides, wind, flooding, and earthquakes, all played a role, depositing vast amounts of sand and gravel in the region.
Over time, two continental plates – the North American and the Pacific plates – crashed into one another, consuming another plate called the Farallon Plate, which has since disappeared. The process led to an uplifting of the giant slabs that now rise above the otherwise flat terrain. The same process also created California’s best-known fault: the San Andreas, which lies only miles away and slices the state California, finally heading into the Pacific Ocean near San Francisco.
The region is a hotbed of geological activity. Two major quakes have taken place in the last 50 years: the Sylmar earthquake of 1971, which killed 64 people, and the 6.7 magnitude 1994 Northridge earthquake, which killed 57 people and injured another 8,700. Most scientists believe we are due for another big earthquake in the relative near future (geologically-speaking).
Credit: Erik Olsen
The rocks at Vaquez point at angles between 45-52 degrees, looking at times like huge ships under sail. In fact, formations of this type are known as โhogs back ridgesโ since they also resemble an arching backbone. Scientists believe they vary in age from 10 to 40 million years old.
Geologists estimate that the rocks sink deep into the earth, perhaps as far as 4 miles. What we see is very much the tip of the iceberg.
For hundreds of millions of years, most of California was found beneath the sea. Very few dinosaur bones have ever been found in California. One exception is the hadrosaur (which also happens to be the state dinosaur). Hadrosaurs were large herbivorous dinosaurs that lived near the end of the Cretaceous. However, marine fossils are plentiful in the region.
There are plenty of wonderful hikes around Vasquez rocks, but seeing them up close is easy, with parking directly beneath some of the most impressive formations. They are very simple to reach from LA, located just off Highway 14. So the next time you happen to be out there, take a moment to gaze and ponder the strange, lovely rocks that have played such a big role in Californiaโs deep geological and cinematographic history.
Here at the California Science Weekly, we are working hard to bring you the most interesting, informative and entertaining stories about science in the state of California. Every week, we pore through hundreds of articles and Web sites to find the top stories that we believe are worthy of your time. We hope you’ll stay with us and share our work with others via Twitter and Facebook. If there is anything you’d be interested in learning more about, send us a note, and let us know.
Animals
An end to California’s magnificent mountain lions?
Credit: US National Park Service
Two mountain lion populations in Southern California face a real threat of extinction if an effort is not made to protect their environment and create so-called “wildlife corridors” through the city’s developed areas, a new study warns.
Thestudy published in the journal Ecologist Applications that examined DNA from the lion’s blood and tissue samples from the 1990s to 2016, shows that the species could soon experience “inbreeding depression”, a term used to describe when genetic diversity has declined to the point that the species’ future existence is called into question. A similar issue occurred with Florida panthers.
The greatest danger facing the magnificent cats remains being struck by a motor vehicle. Mountain lion advocates are hoping for approval for a $60 million Liberty Canyon Wildlife Crossing over Highway 101 connecting the Santa Monica Mountains to the Sierra Madre Mountain Range. It’s possible construction of the corridor could begin as early as 2022.
Credit: Eastman Collection of the University of California, Davis
When most of us think of the California gold rush, we picture gold panners hunched over a stream, or shoveling dirt into long, wooden sluices, all in an effort to reveal so-called color, shiny pieces of malleable yellow metal that brought thousands of people to California. But in the later years of the gold rush, in the 1860s and 70s, hydraulic mining was the dominant method of extracting gold from the hills.
Hydraulic mining used high-pressure jets of water to dislodge rocky material or move sediment. The jets were so powerful that men were killed by the force of the water from 200 feet away. It was extremely efficient, but also incredibly damaging to the environment. By the time hydraulic mining was banned in 1884, according to John McPhee’s Assembling California, hydraulic mining was responsible for removing 13 billion cubic yards of the Sierras.
Climate Change
The disappearance of Yosemite’s Lyell glacier
Credit: USGS
Greg Stock is a geologist at Yosemite National Park where, for the last decade, he has documented the decline of the park’s Lyell glacier. The glacier sits on Mount Lyell, the tallest peak in Yosemite National Park (13,120 feet). An 1883 photograph (above) shows the glacier spread across 13 million square feet. Current photographs reveal mostly bedrock now, a sad tale of global warming and the rapid loss of glacial ice in California.
Daniel Duane of California Sunday Magazine visited the remains of the glacier and followed along with Stock as he continued a 135-year effort to map and understand the glacier’s decline. It’s a wonderfully well-wrought tale, but like so many stories in these warming days, it’s a depressing one.
Descanso Gardensโ rare collection of dinosaur-era plants
Cycad plant
In 2014, La Canada Flintridge residents Katia and Frederick Elsea called the city’s Descanso Gardens with an odd proposal: would the famous horticultural center take their collection of over 180 cycads rare cycads, a fern-like plant from the days of the dinosaurs?
The garden said yes, and now those plants are part of Descanso Gardensโ Ancient Forest. Cycads are so old, in fact, they appear in fossils from over 280 million years ago. That makes them far older than flowers. (Flowering plants first appeared in the Jurassic period about 175 million years ago.) In the Ancient Forest, there are also redwoods, tree ferns and ginkgoes, all โliving fossilsโ from a long past era.
Descanso is also the location of North America’s largest collection of Camellias, a genus found in eastern and southern Asia, from the Himalayas to Japan and Indonesia. At the gardens, there are also some of the oldest oak trees in the city, dating back to Spanish colonial times, beneath which you can take a stroll or simply hang out and enjoy the shade.
If you’d like to learn more about the gardens, check out this episode of Lost LA.
Global warming promises to bring more than just sea level rise, more severe storms, and destructive wildfires. According to researchers at Stanford University, a change in the earth’s temperatures is also likely to increase the range and numbers of biting insects like mosquitos, that seek out warmer, wetter climes. California itself could be impacted, with the insects pushing north from tropical climes.
Mosquitoes transmit numerous harmful diseases including malaria, dengue fever, chikungunya and West Nile virus. It’s estimated that they kill about 1 million people a year.
The Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) has begun a program to use drones to find and respond to fires. It’s potentially a very big deal, given that the 2018 wildfire season was the deadliest and most destructive on record in California. Some 8,527 fires burned across 1,893,913 acres last year. That’s larger than the state of Delaware. It was the largest burned area ever recorded in a fire season, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The agency is partnering with Chinese drone-maker DJI, in what is being called one of the first partnerships between a drone company and a major fire agency. The LAFD will use drones equipped with both visual and thermal imaging cameras that will provide real-time video and data transmission to incident commanders.
UC Irvine professor Simon Penny and his students are building an ancient Micronesian outrigger boat called a proa to get people interested in long lost seafaring traditions and to promote indigenous science. He hopes, too, to support Pacific indigenous groups to reconnect with their historic mastery of the sea and sailing. And he’s also doing it because it’s fun. Instead of balsa, the 30-foot boat called Orthogonal will be made out of wood with a fiberglass skin. Penny told the California Science Weekly in an email that the craft could launch as early as summer 2019.
FOR FUN
Catland: Disneyland is home to a large colony of feral cats. An Instagram accounttells their story in photos.
California Underground: a fascinating podcast from the magnificent new California Magazine Alta takes you into the world of urban explorers, bold adventurers who venture into abandoned buildings and structures.
Sure, you’ve seen all the lovely pictures, but have you seen the Superbloom by drone?Here at the California Science Weekly we decided to visit the Superbloom near Lancaster, but rather than simply take pictures, we busted out our drone to bring you a few images of the rare California Superbloom. Enjoy!
Here at the California Science Weekly, we are working hard to bring you the most interesting, informative and entertaining stories about science in the state of California. Every week, we pore through hundreds of articles and Web sites to find the top stories that we believe are worthy of your time. We will also be writing feature stories, developing a podcast and producing a video series that will take our content offerings to a whole new level. We hope you’ll stay with us and share our work with others via Twitter and Facebook. If there is anything you’d be interested in learning more about, send us a note, and let us know.
Biology
An homage to Cal Tech’s fly lab
Credit: Sanjay Acharya
Few critters in the history of science have been as important to our understanding of life as the humble fruit fly. The genus Drosophila melanogaster holds a particularly esteemed spot among the dozens of model organisms that provide insight into life’s inner workings. Much of the work has taken place, and is taking place now, right here in California.
CalTech Magazine has a wonderful story by Lori Dajose about the crucial role the fruit fly has played in science and why we should all revere this underappreciated insect.
The story begins in 1906 at Columbia University in the fly lab Thomas Hunt Morgan, whose work with white-eyed mutants established chromosomes as the pathway of inheritance for genes. Morgan made his way to CalTech in 1928 to found the school’s Division of Biology, and ever since then, the school has been a launching pad for ground-breaking research (and a few Nobel Prizes) using fruit flies.
Other notable names involved in fruit fly research include Ed Lewis, who helped standardize fruit fly food, but more importantly discovered how Hox genes control embryonic development (for which he won the 1995 Nobel Prize) and Seymour Benzer, a pioneer the field of neurogenetics and the subject of one of our favorite science books of all time here at the CSW: Jonathan Weiner’s Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior. The breakthroughs made in Benzer’s Fly Rooms form the basis of much of our current understanding of genes and behavior.
The essay goes on to describe the great work that continues at CalTech with researchers like Elizabeth Hong, who is investigating how the brain orders and encodes complex odors, David Anderson, who studies emotions and behaviors, and Michael Dickinson, whose lab investigates how the tiny fruit fly brain gives rise to flight. So much to learn from one little insect and one great institution.
Two hours south of San Francisco, a lawyer turned horticulturalist named C. Todd Kennedy is helping preserve Americaโs agricultural legacy. Todd is one of Californiaโs premier experts on fruit. As a co-founder of the Arboreum Company, he has single-handedly saved numerous rare varieties of so-called stone fruit like peaches, plums, and apricots from possibly disappearing forever.
Using a cutting edge new type of microscope, scientists at the University of California, Irvine have for the first time captured images of the way that a molecule vibrates down at the atomic level. These vibrations drive the chemistry of all matter, including the function of living cells. โFrom structural changes in chemistry to molecular signaling, all dynamical processes in life have to do with molecular vibrations, without which all would be frozen,โ said co-author V. Ara Apkarian, a UCI Distinguished Professor of chemistry.
The breakthrough was published in a paper in the science journal Nature. The advance could open up new ways of seeing and understanding the sub-microscopic/ atomic world. The research was conducted at UCIโs Center for Chemistry at the Space-Time Limit, maybe the coolest name for a lab ever.
All the snow we’ve been getting in the high Sierras may cause skiers and farmers to rejoice, but a new study from Emily Montgomery-Brown at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, suggests a connection between the heavy runoff following record snowfall in the Sierra Nevada and small earthquakes. Using historical records, Montgomery-Brown and others have determined that small earthquakes occur 37 times more often when there is high runoff from melting snowpack. One theory is that the water permeates the ground and changes pressures deep down within faults, leading to small quakes.
You have probably never heard of Klotho, but according to a story by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times, this mysterious hormone could one day lead to a way to prevent, or even enhance, cognitive ability.
Research on mice by Dr. Dena Dubal at the University of California, San Francisco, suggests that Klotho protects mice from cognitive decline, likely due to Alzheimerโs disease. The mice bred to make extra Klotho also performed better running mazes and in other cognitive tests. “Klotho didnโt just protect their brains, the researchers concluded โ it enhanced them,” writes Zimmer. Further research suggests that Klotho could also extend life.
In March, Dr. Dubal released a study suggesting that Klotho may also protect people from Alzheimerโs disease. The Alzheimer’s Association says that 5.8 million Americans are currently living with the debilitating disease.
The bigger question that the piece raises is whether Klotho pills or gene manipulation techniques like Crispr that might stimulate Klotho production, could someday be available to humans for cognitive enhancement. In other words, brain boosting. The idea raises numerous ethical questions such as who would get access and how much would it cost? What if you could pass these enhancements on to your children? “If people could raise their SAT scores by taking a pill the night before an exam,” writes Zimmer, “that might not seem fair.”
It’s mind-boggling enough that we’ve been able to explore Mars using rovers big and small. But what if the next step is navigating the red planet with a vehicle that can lift off and soar above the dusty surface?
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is testing a new helicopter, a small, autonomous rotorcraft weighing about four pounds, that will travel with the Mars 2020 rover, one of JPL’s most ambitious projects ever. The 2020 rover is currently scheduled to launch in July 2020 and is expected to reach Mars in February 2021. The vehicle has been in development since August 2013 at JPL’s testing facility in La Canada Flintridge, California.
Flying a copter on Mars is a lot more challenging than doing so on earth. The thin atmosphere means that the copter’s blades will have to spin at almost 3,000 rpm, about 10 times the rate of a helicopter on Earth. Then there is the Martian climate with dust storms and temperatures that can fall as low as minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit.
The copter project is only one small part of the larger Mars 2020 mission, and is considered a high-risk, high-reward project. If it fails, it won’t impact the mission’s larger goals, including answering key questions about the potential for life on Mars.
A magnificent multimedia story by the Los Angeles Times looks at the fate of the Holly oil platform off the coast of Southern California. Oil rigs have long been a source of controversy in California, especially following the January 28, 1969 oil spill near Santa Barbara, which gushed 80,000 barrels of oil into the ocean. The spill led California, and then Congress, to enact numerous measures to stop the development of new platforms in local and federal waters. A 2015 spill at Holly essentially shut the platform down, and now the state must wrestle with what to do with it. Pull it out? Turn it into an artificial reef? Interestingly, the platform is said to have inspired the Doors’ Jim Morrison to write โThe Crystal Ship.โ
On a related note, it turns out that many of the oil rigs off the California coast harbor an unusual diversity and abundance of biological life. Milton Love, a marine biologist at the University of California Santa Barbara, has done several studies of the rigs off the coast and published several papers documenting their extremely high productivity.
A current California law allows oil companies to turn rigs into reefs, but no company has so far taken the steps to do so, largely because the rigs are still producing oil. Maybe, this will hasten the movement to do so.
The recent rains across the state have not only helped refill water-starved reservoirs, but they also have led to a few astonishing sights: like a 10-mile wide lake in Death Valley. Petapixel published a series of incredible photos of this rare event. They were taken by fine art landscape and seascape photographer Elliot McGucken.
Although he never paid a visit to the Golden State, Charles Darwin is very much present right here in Southern California. Many people are probably unaware that the Huntington Library houses an impressive collection of Darwin artifacts, including what is likely the last known portrait of the Father of Evolution. The Mohr Darwin Collection holds nearly 1,700 publications by and about Charles Darwin and his circle. The collection continues to grow, in fact. In February 2018, the library acquired 19 original prints, offering a fascinating glimpse into the intimate Darwin family circle.
An astonishingly rich trove of fossils has been discovered by crews tunneling a new branch of the Los Angeles subway. The discovery includes more than 500 fossils of Ice Age animals, including saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths and huge mammoths. The fossils show up at around 15 feet, according to paleontologist Cassidy Sharp. The fossils were found at stations along the Metroโs Purple Line around La Brea Avenue, Fairfax Avenue and La Cienega Boulevard.
