^{Doris Sloane, author of Geology of the San Francisco Bay Region, gives a public lecture in the Berkeley Hills in 2007. Photo by Andrew Alden.}

Learning about geology isn't just a matter of going out and wandering around, as fun as that is. Books help a lot, starting with a simple rocks-and-minerals guide. Going beyond that first book can lead to a library, and my own shelves keep getting more crowded. Books for Bay Area geology enthusiasts make up a more manageable list. Let me show you my favorites.

I have reviewed several of these for About.com. To see those reviews, click the asterisk next to the book title.

Appetizers

California Rocks!, by Katherine Baylor (Mountain Press), is an appetite-whetting collection of 65 geo-destinations around the state, 14 of them in the Bay Area. Photo-licious and engaging, this is a book to pull out whether you're planning a California vacation or a local day trip.

Roadside Geology of Northern and Central California, by David Alt and Donald Hyndman (Mountain Press), covers wider ground and is organized around the major roads. It's an excellent companion for any California road trip, giving you insight into the landscape around your windshield and suggestions for side trips when you have an extra hour or two.

Entrees

Geology of the San Francisco Bay Region *, by Doris Sloane with photographs by John Karachewsky (UC Press), is a beautifully produced compendium that systematically introduces the region from the Bay itself to the mountains around it, including maps, tables of information, field trip ideas and the background knowledge to make the most of them. It's built to last, too.

A Streetcar to Subduction, by the late Clyde Wahrhaftig (American Geophysical Union), presents seven field trips in and near San Francisco using public transit. Wahrhaftig, who never learned to drive, was a superb field geologist and teacher.

Field Guide to the San Andreas Fault *, by David Lynch (Thule Scientific), is a mile-by-mile road log that covers the great fault from end to end. If you're as serious about the fault as I am, you'll want this to support the extensive traveling it will take to visit the whole thing. It's divided into 12 day trips, three of which encompass the Bay Area.

Finding Fault in California: An Earthquake Tourist's Guide *, by Susan Hough (Mountain Press), focuses on faults throughout California that you can visit in person, but the San Andreas naturally has pride of place. Hough is a very good teacher of earthquake science, too.

Geologic Field Trips in Northern California (California Division of Mines and Geology Special Publication 119) is a hard-core set of annotated road logs published for the Geological Society of America's Cordilleran Section centennial meeting in 1999. Trips include unsung features in the Bay Area and outliers such as the Sutter Buttes, Santa Lucia Range and the western Sierra.

1906 San Francisco Earthquake Centennial Field Guides (Geological Society of America Field Guide 7) includes annotated walks in San Francisco, day trips in the surrounding area, and a four-day loop through Northern California exploring subduction rocks.

Dessert

Magnitude 8 *, by Philip Fradkin (UC Press), is my favorite book on the San Andreas fault for home reading because Fradkin goes beyond geology and field trips (which he covers well) to explore the mindset that our earthquake-prone region has fostered. There is no better treatment of the geologic roots of our peculiar local culture.

A Wine Journey along the Russian River *, by Steve Heimoff (UC Press), explores the land and vines and wines associated with the Russian River. It's naturally a treat for wine lovers, but he treats the river itself and the rocks it traverses in unexpected depth. If wine is your magic key to everything else, this will open a new door for you.

San Francisco Bay, by Harold Gilliam (Doubleday), is a 1957 classic that will smother you in pleasure and nostalgia as it sweeps through the geological, natural and cultural history of "California's vital inland sea." Look for it wherever old books are sold.

Day Trips: Roaming the Backroads of Northern California, by Peter Browning (Chronicle Books), is a supplementary text that will help you reach some truly remote parts of the Bay Area, although it will not tell you a lot about the rocks you're seeing.

Rocks and Minerals of California, by Vinson Brown, David Allan and James Stark (Naturegraph), is a compact guide to mineral localities of the whole state. It includes abundant maps and tables that will get you to places no other book will list.

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This weekend, I went to Año Nuevo State Reserve to see the elephant seals, along with 14 Oakland middle schoolers. Some friends at The Lawrence Hall of Science, where I work, needed an extra driver for a field trip. I’d never been to Año Nuevo before, so I volunteered. We had a great trip—warm weather, a terrific tour guide, and plenty of animals to observe. Those perceptive middle schoolers narrowed in on a few salient facts about elephant seal life.

We took a guided walk through the sand dunes with a docent named Bob. He started and ended the tour with poems by John Muir, peppered the kids with questions, and told us some amazing info about elephant seals. He had elephant seal whiskers in his pocket, and a piece of molted skin, which he passed around to the students. They were simultaneously repulsed and fascinated. After two hours in the warm sun, peering at elephant seals through binoculars and snapping photos with cell phones, we were headed back. During our long walk from the beach to the parking lot, I asked a few kids what they found most interesting about the elephant seals. And when we got back the parking lot, we asked the kids to share with a partner what they learned about the seals, and what they still wondered. Here are the top three things that middle schoolers noticed about elephant seals.

1. Elephant seals mate. Right in front of you. And… it’s sort of violent. Males move in on the females, and sometimes bite them so they won’t struggle. As our tour guide explained, pregnant female elephant seals come onshore to give birth in December. When they head out to sea a few months later, they’re pregnant again. They’ll return to Año Nuevo and repeat the process again next year. As one girl put it, “I wouldn’t like to have a baby every year. And I wouldn’t like it if I couldn’t pick who dad would be.” From the sounds of some of those female elephant seals, they may feel the same way.

2. Elephant seal moms are mean. They nurse their babies for about a month, and then leave the babies to fend for themselves. Elephant seal milk is super fatty—the pups gain up to 250 pounds during their month of nursing. Once they’re fattened up, the moms take off. The pups are then called weaners, and they live off their fat while they learn to swim and fish for themselves. About 50% of the weaners will survive the year. However, some weaners don’t even make it off the beach. We saw a skinny-looking little elephant seal, all alone, making meager movements of its flippers to flick sand onto its body to keep cool. It was forlorn and wrinkly, not glossy, fat, and round like its neighbors. Bob said it probably wouldn’t survive. It likely got separated from its mother before it had gotten fat enough to get through the weeks without food. The students were really upset about the fact that we were standing on the sand dunes, basically watching this little elephant seal die.

A dominant male elephant seal shows who’s boss.

3. Elephant seals can be huge. The dominant males, called bulls, can be up to 16 feet long. This is three times the height of Justin Beiber, who, as I learned on the drive out, is only 5 foot 4. Big male elephant seals can move improbably quickly across the sand, to defend their harem from smaller males who try to mate with the females on the sly. In their rush to scare away the interlopers, the big bulls sometimes mow down little elephant seal pups. The small pups are basking in the sun, and can’t get out of the way in time. About 5% of the pups at Año Nuevo are crushed under adult seals. We might have seen a pup get mowed down. Maybe. Its rear flippers might have been squished; we weren’t really sure. The little guy moved a bit, but then stopped moving. Then it moved again. And then it was time to go.

Look!

These kids will go on a series of field trips throughout the year, to tidepools and marine labs, as part of a Lawrence Hall of Science program funded by a California Coastal Commission Whale Tail Grant. The Coastal Commission awards dozens of grants for youth programs and coastal cleanups. The funding comes from the sales of the Whale Tail license plate.

Learn more about elephant seals in Sheraz Sadiq’s QUEST blog post, Diving to New Scientific Depths with Elephant Seals.

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Kids will want to keep learning science when they see how fun it is.

These programs tend to be more expensive than other programs and so are natural targets for the axe.  For example, at my kids' school, they are cutting 5^th grade science camp.

Kids go off for a 5 day trip to a place out in the woods to study nature.  The kids have a blast and can see that science is more than memorizing phyla or sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic rocks.  Instead they get to explore nature and use books to figure out what they're seeing.

And if history is any guide, there will be a big fall off in field trips to zoos and museums too.  These are more places where kids can see that science is actually a lot of fun.

Some might argue that if money is limited these programs should be cut.  This is true only if we want a workforce that can't do the jobs that are becoming available in our information based economy.

To do well in the future job market, people are going to need a good basic understanding of science and/or engineering.  Think about what an auto mechanic does these days.  Or a nurse or a radiologist.

We need to keep people studying science for their own good.  And frankly, for the good of the U.S. as well.

One of the keys to getting more people to take the science they need is to show them how fun and exciting it is.  We need to let them see that science is actually about studying the mysteries of the natural world and applying them to make that world a better place.

This is what the programs that are going to be cut do.  Without them, schools will continue to turn kids away from science.  And the U.S. will fall behind other countries.

I have no idea what programs should be cut instead and I am sure that other people see higher priorities than science camp.  But I think it is time that public schools recognized that science is as important to a student's future as are the three R's.  Someone needs to come up with a way to make science into an R so we can have the four R's.  Any ideas?

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