Deep Oakland: How Geology Formed a City

A San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller

Read the rocks as only a geologist can, with this deep drill-down into Oaklands geological history and its impacts on the citys urban present.

This book has turned me into a newcomer to my own city, but has also changed the way I will view any landscape. I can think of few greater gifts than that.Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing

Spending time with Andrew Alden is like giving yourself x-ray eyes. Roman Mars, host and creator of 99% Invisible

Beneath Oaklands streets and underfoot of every scurrying creature atop them, rocks roil, shift, crash, and collide in an ever-churning seismological saga. Playing out since time immemorial, the deep geology of this city has chiseled and carved its landforms and the lives of everyonefrom the Ohlone to the settlers to the transients and transplantswho has called this singular place home.

In Deep Oakland, geologist Andrew Alden excavates the ancient story of Oaklands geologic underbelly and reveals how its silt, soil, and subterranean sinews are intimately entwined with its human historyand future. Poised atop a world-famous fault line now slumbering, Alden charts how these quaking rocks gave rise to the hills and the flats; how ice-age sand dunes gave root to the citys eponymous oak forests; how the Jurassic volcanoes of Leona Heights gave way to mining boom times; how Lake Merritt has swelled and disappeared a dozen times over the course of its million-year lifespan; and how each epochal shift has created the terrain cradling Oaklanders today. With Alden as our guideand with illustrations by Laura Cunningham, author of A State of Changewe see that just as Oakland is a human crossroads, a convergence of cultures from the world over, so too is the bedrock below, carried here from parts still incompletely known.