Oakland Geology

For one of Oakland’s most rugged places, the west side of Lake Temescal doesn’t expose a lot of rock. But what’s there is unusual for Oakland, and interesting.

I’m talking about this ridge — tectonically, a shutter ridge — across the lake from the swimming beach.

The map of Lake Temescal Regional Park shows two trails there, the low one along the water and the high one up in the woods. An even higher trail, not marked on the map, is off limits and doesn’t expose much rock anyway.

I often wish I’d lived here in the 19th century when Oakland was new. It was in 1868 when Anthony Chabot acquired a steep little canyon back of the hills and built a dam to supply the young city with dependable water service. His technique, perfected in the gold fields of the Sierra, was to take a high-pressure water hose and wash down the sand and gravel from the hillsides to build the dam. I wish I could have inspected the scrubbed slopes at that time, but there were almost no trained geologists in the whole state, let alone me.

The canyon has a flat floor now, after decades of sedimentation, but you can see from the high trail that it’s still steep and narrow.

And the action didn’t end when Chabot finished the dam. He built a control tower in the new reservoir, but a landslide soon took it out. I’m guessing that was probably near the sluicegate where the beach house is today, and I’m guessing that the rainy winters of 1868-69 and 1869-70 plus afterslip and aftershocks of the big 1868 earthquake on the Hayward fault had something to do with it.

Speaking of which, two major strands of the Hayward fault run right through the reservoir. They’re helpfully shown on the map above. This is where the main strand crosses the dam. (Don’t worry, the massive dam will not fail even under the largest possible quake on this fault.)

The dam itself was raised and then lowered during the next few decades, and presumably the lake rose and fell too. Meanwhile trees and brush moved in upon the slopes where the Ohlone had previously maintained grassy meadows, and the rocks decayed and soil built up.

And the rocks themselves embody the complicated history of starting out in a vigorous subduction zone, being deeply buried and exhumed probably more than once, then being torn up and shoved around by the San Andreas fault system of which the Hayward fault is part.

All that is to say that Lake Temescal is a dynamic area at all time scales. It’s more complex than the small-scale geologic maps can show, even though it’s complex enough on that map.

^{KJfm, Franciscan melange; ch, chert block; af, artificial fill; sc, silica-carbonate rock; sp, serpentinite; Jsv, Leona volcanics; fs, Franciscan sandstone; KJkm, Knoxville Formation}

The west side is mapped as melange, which is basically a mess of mashed-up sandstone with big blocks of other rocks, each with its own separate history, suspended in it. The little blip labeled “ch” is this block of chert at the top of Hill Road. So when I visited the west side trails last week, I expected to find things I didn’t expect. And most of the rock along the trails appears to be nondescript sandstone — I say appears because since hammering is forbidden, it’s hard to find a fresh surface. But lo and behold, along the high path coming down from Broadway Terrace, there’s the telltale gleam of blueschist in the exposed subsoil.

The color really comes out when you wet a piece.

Other apparently high-grade metamorphic rocks include this hard, glittering schist. Not having access to thin sections and petrographic microscopes, I can’t check for the presence of jadeite, which has been reported in blocks from this melange.

And over at the north end of the train is a distinctive outcrop of another schist. Hard rock supports slow-growing lichens, and the species differ depending on the rock’s chemistry.

Underneath the lichens, the rock is a bluish-gray mixture with a strongly folded texture, both signs of a rock that’s been through a lot of distortion at high pressure and temperature. These photos are from exposures by the lawn. The first shows the folding and the second shows fault-related crushing on the left side. The crushed material is called gouge, and bits of it are common in this sector.

My authority on Oakland’s Franciscan rocks, John Wakabayashi, holds that the west side of the lake hides the same ancient major thrust fault — a megathrust, in fact — that’s famously exposed in El Cerrito above the recycling center, where high-grade rocks have been pushed above lower-grade rocks. Unfortunately the fault itself appears to be in “a brush-filled gully with no exposure,” so it may be a while before we ever learn more.

But I did learn something more last week, about the beach house.

It is made with the local rock, namely the Leona volcanics. Whether the stones came from the hill just upslope to the east, the one that collapsed in the 1870s landslide, or from across the freeway in the great Tunnel Road cut during the 1930s, I do not know. I’m guessing the former, but I would be happy to be wrong if it means I can be certain. Putting the building and the roadcut in the same photo, there is a resemblance.

The fun thing is, both locations can be closely inspected. That sounds like a good afternoon project.