Oakland Geology

After tramping all over Oakland, I still find its landscape full of uncertainty and mystery. The alluring hills of King Estate Open Space Park have brought me here time and again, sometimes to lead walks, sometimes to just stop and smell the flowers. Last month I came back yet again, this time to look harder at it.

The best resource on the park’s history and vision is on the Oak Knoll Neighborhood Improvement Association site at oknia.org. The aspirational Site Plan has the following concept for the park: “The winds sweep my imagination across the horizon. We move over the hills exploring the wilds and oaks embrace us. Here, in this place for everyday we cultivate community.”

King Estate Park is a grassy ridge at the south end of the Millsmont-Eastmont hills, an apparent pressure ridge that stretches along the Hayward fault from Mills College to the Oakland Zoo area, between Seminary Creek and Arroyo Viejo. What drew me here as a geologist was the geologic map (USGS MF-2342) that depicts the area as a peculiar ancient gravel (Qpoaf on the map), the largest piece of this material in Oakland.

The attractive thing is that according to the map key, these deposits “locally contain freshwater mollusks and extinct Pleistocene vertebrate fossils.” The odd thing is that they don’t match another criterion: that this dense gravel “can be related to modern stream courses.”

I explored the portion of the park north of Fontaine Street. Here’s the street map, marked with the three locations I’ll be showing photos of.

And here’s the aerial view, from Google Earth.

And just for fun, here’s the digital elevation model, with buildings and trees removed.

OK! Location 1 is on the steep western slope at the north end of the park, which I climbed. Halfway up is a sizable area of rock rubble consisting entirely of Leona volcanics, the same bedrock shown in pink labeled “Jsv” on the geologic map. The near-outcrop is in the lower left corner of this shot.

And the rock looks like this.

Down at location 2, there’s a spiral labyrinth that people have made in the last few years; I don’t remember seeing it before. But on the assumption that it’s made of stones from the immediate surroundings, I infer that it’s Leona volcanics over here too.

The Leona is generally light-colored with some greenish bits and some red-orange coatings where it’s weathered, hard to describe in detail but distinctive once you’re familiar with it. Once a range of underwater volcanoes that subsequently underwent a lot of alteration, it offers up a variety of intriguing bits that lacking a petrographic lab I can only scratch my head at.

Anyway I’m looking all over, and every bit of gravel on this hill is Leona volcanics. Now a river gravel, which is what the map describes and what I expected (indeed, what I actually perceived on previous visits!), consists of rounded clasts and a variety of rock types from the stream’s catchment. Other gravels in this town are just that way, but not this. The whole time I’m there I’m muttering to myself, “this stuff is colluvium” — raw rock rubble, mixed with soil, that hasn’t moved from its birthplace except maybe in landslides.

In location 3, we have proper bedrock. It show up where the soil has been scraped bare . . .

. . . and farther down the slope in genuine outcrops, which I always cherish.

So in sum, the whole north half of the park, far as I can tell, is either bedrock or colluvium of the same stuff: Leona volcanics. How did it get to be mapped as Pleistocene river gravel? The MF-2342 geologic map was published in 2000. There are two previous serious maps of this area. Dorothy Radbruch mapped it in the 1960s for map GQ-769, and there the area looks like this.

She called it “Qg”, “gravel, sand and clay” and noted that it contains pebbles of Leona Rhyolite (what I call Leona volcanics). She also said this: “Contains molluscs of probable early Pleistocene (Irvingtonian) age.” They were at the locality marked by the triangle with “22133” next to it; that number refers to a “report filed at Washington, D.C.” which is probably gathering dust deep in a back room. She also referred to reports on two boreholes, numbered 95 and 96 on the map, which recorded various kinds of gravel down as deep as 45 feet. That could’ve been deeply weathered Leona as easily as anything else.

But you know what? I’m going to go with Andrew Lawson’s original map of the area from 1914 (Folio 193), in which everything is just straight Leona.

Even though he thought the Leona was very young (hence the name “Tln” meaning Tertiary Leona), he could tell what the ground was saying. At least, he and I agree. I’m sure, though, that he scratched his head as much as Dorothy Radbruch and I did. And they must have enjoyed the view as much as me.

I’ll just have to poke around here some more.

This entry was posted on 4 March 2019 at 8:02 am and is filed under Leona volcanics, Oakland geology puzzles, Oakland geology views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.