California's amazing geology / Удивительная геология Калифорнии

This book was inspired when I began to teach California geology at the college level and found there were no books suitable for such a course. All the books on the market either were grossly out of date or didn’t discuss the modern understanding of California tectonics. California has one of the most amazing and complex histories of any state in the United States, and so the simplistic approaches of the books currently on the market do not do it justice. In this book, I tried to give a taste of this incredible jigsaw puzzle of California geology without going into too much depth or requiring too much specialized geologic training. In particular, I am familiar with the backgrounds of most college students taking a course like this at a community college or many of the four-year universities in the state, and so I do not assume that they have taken a previous course in introductory physical geology. For that reason, the first five chapters of the book are a quick review of the basic concepts needed to understand the fundamentals of geology assumed in the book. Other concepts, such as glacial geomorphology, coastal geology, and volcanology, are introduced in later chapters as appropriate.

An updated book on California’s fascinating geology should also interest the general reader who has no previous background on the state. Again, the introductory chapters are written to give any reader a grasp of fundamental geologic concepts, so that the rest of the story makes sense.

Fate has placed me in an unusually good position to write this book. I have taught college-level geology for almost 40 years, for 27 years at Occidental College in Los Angeles, but also at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, the California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, and community colleges such as Pierce College in Woodland Hills, Glendale College in Glendale, and Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut. Thus, I have a wealth of experience in teaching this material at the college level, and leading hundreds of field trips to localities all over California. These include not only trips I led as a college instructor, but also field trips I have led for the Pacific Section SEPM (Society for Sedimentary Geology), for which I have served as president and vice president, and for groups such as the Skeptic Society. In addition, I’m a secondgeneration Californian, hooked on dinosaurs at age 4, and I never outgrew my love of paleontology.

My first field trip experiences were as a Cub Scout collecting fossils in Old Topanga Canyon, and I’ve had many such experiences since then. I received my undergraduate education from the University of California, Riverside, where a very active department ran field trips out into the Mojave Desert and Transverse Ranges dozens of times each year. Finally, for many years I have collected fossils and published research and done fieldwork in the Cenozoic strata of the West Coast <...>