Michael R. Forrest
Geologist, Southern California Earthquake Center, USC
If you haven't been there, Palos Verdes is not to be missed. With a cooler stocked to the brim, the top down, good company, good music on the stereo, and comfortable shoes, a summer trip to the peninsula, with its Mediterranean climate, is usually nothing less than breezy ecstasy.
Palos Verdes, which is situated on the southwestern edge of the L.A. basin, is both a product and record of the earthquake-busy geologic processes at play in the southland.
It is dirty with fossils and an excellent window into much of L.A.'s distant past - back to before tract homes and mini-malls covered the hills, to when saber-toothed tigers pawed mastodon bones and lay yawning on red rocks, their tails twitching under a hot noonday sun; back to when P.V. was an island isolated from the mainland and, even earlier, when it lay at the bottom of the sea - the ocean floor stretching, smoking, erupting, and glowing with orange lava as the Los Angeles basin first opened up.
Palos Verdes' green terrace hillsides, tide pools, sea caves, sea stacks, and hidden pocket beaches also provide numerous coffee-table-picture-book-perfect examples of modern coastal geologic processes, as well as one of California's most spectacular, active, and costly landslides.
The Southern California Earthquake Center Palos Verdes Field Trip Guide is written for anyone interested in Palos Verdes and L.A. - their geologic past and present. It's for people who appreciate hills, faults, mountains, beaches, and sunny Saturdays on Pacific Coast Highway. In it are directions to a couple of localities where you can find fish fossils, rocks for your backyard rock pile, and much, much more.
To get your copy, call the SCEC at 213-740-1560, send e-mail to scecinfo@coda.usc.edu, or visit the center at SCEC, University of Southern California, University Park, Los Angeles, California 90089-0742.
