Asked whether that connection need be scientifically grounded, Moores says yes, but it also includes a need for nonquantifiable links such as ethics or feelings of beauty and awe. Earth is the basis of our life, he says. \u201cThere\u2019s a saying: If you can\u2019t grow it, you have to mine it. Everything is dependent on soil.\u201d<\/p>\n
Coming to the piece of soil that concerns this visit, Moores pulls out a digital relief map of California topography. \u201cYou can see the Valley\u2019s almost as flat as the sea itself. This is much flatter than the Great Plains. The Valley was created by the uplifting of the coastal ranges and the Sierras millions of years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n
With one hand pushing in from the coast and the other pushing in toward the valley from the Sierras, Moores says, \u201cThis coastal area is a where the hills are coming up very rapidly, moving eastward and rumpling up the west edge of the Valley. At the same time faults in the Sierra are tilting westward.\u201d<\/p>\n
I ask Moores how quickly the coastal ranges are doing this \u201crumpling.\u201d \u201cOh, on about an average of two millimeters a year.\u201d Starting to feel claustrophobic, I inquire, \u201cDoes that mean the Valley will one day disappear?\u201d Very possibly, he confirms. How soon? Moores makes a quick calculation: \u201cOh, in about 50 million years.\u201d<\/p>\n
When I ask whether something can\u2019t be done to stop this, Moores and his wife laugh heartily. I\u2019m starting to miss the Valley already.<\/p>\n
\u201cStill,\u201d Moores proceeds, \u201cthe question is, why is the Valley like that? Why is it so low while everything around it is coming up?\u201d This was a question I didn\u2019t even think could be asked.<\/p>\n
As it turns out, Nicola Godfrey, a young Englishwoman doing her dissertation at Stanford, had just this past December published what appears to be the definitive answer to that very question. Underlying the Valley is a \u201cbasement,\u201d half of which is an extension of the Sierra, half of which is called the Franciscan melange, coming in from the west. For decades this \u201cbasement\u201d has exuded a \u201cmagnetic anomaly”\u2014that is, a magnetic force which is typical of ocean floor rock, but not the continental shelf rock under the Valley.<\/p>\n
Through a series of experiments, which included placing plastic explosives in the ground and measuring their force with seismic meters, Godfrey showed that a large slab of ocean rock material\u2014called ophiolite\u2014sits on top of the continental shelf, from Redding to Bakersfield. Since this ocean rock slab is heavier than the other, it prevents disturbance of the valley floor from below.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the first time, we understand why the Valley is here,\u201d Moores says. Without that ocean slab intersecting between the valley floor and the continental shelf, the Valley would probably have a lot more irregular features, like hills and dales, throughout.<\/p>\n
A couple of weeks after this visit, Moores was to guide me on a trip to Lake Berryessa, where the ocean rock material can be seen, uplifted by the coastal ranges and sitting vertically to the Valley.<\/p>\n
But before I left Eldrige and Judy Moores, I had to ask how they personally had responded to coming to the Valley in 1966 from Princeton, N.J., and New York. Eldridge, who grew up in the Arizona desert, found it oppressive at first, \u201cthe flatness, the lack of a place to get up and look out.\u201d Judy says that she went through a period of \u201cbereavement. The feelings of missing the autumnal colors, the change of seasons, were that strong. I was in a state of mourning.\u201d<\/p>\n
Both agreed that they had come to love the Sacramento Valley. But it was a matter of adjusting to the subtleties of the changes.<\/p>\n
I left the Mooreses thankful to know why the Valley was here and awestruck by the prospect that one day it would not be. Already, I was seeing the the flatness differently. As Moores had told me during our field trip, \u201cIf you know how to read the landscape, it tells you its story.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Asked whether that connection need be scientifically grounded, Moores says yes, but it also includes a need for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":374831,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[121,123,122],"class_list":["post-374830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sacramento","tag-sacramento","tag-sacramento-headlines","tag-sacramento-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374830\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/374831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}