Patterns & Processes in Rockfall Dynamics from 1977-2022

 

The author in about 1977.  My dog Blackie in the foreground.

Since 1977 when I was 17 I have been fascinated by the dynamic nature of our coast here along the Monterey Bay.  I can never go down to the same shore twice; it’s in constant flux, never the same as it was the day before.  One of the things that I have been tracking as a paleontologist here are the rockfalls that are continually happening as a coastal erosional process.  These rockfalls are singularly amazing, not only in

Capitola Beach looking toward New Brighton, early 1900's and 2019.

their size and scope, but in the history of our bay that they reveal.  With each new fall, like turning the pages of a book, new information comes to light and a more complete picture of the history of our bay begins to form in my mind.  This process is a decadal revelation; only imaginable over long periods of time, with emergent information coming to light in the longer scale that is not visible from year to year.  Not year-to-

The scale of some of these rockfalls is immense.  Here is Susan for perspective.

year; but more expansive time over 10-, 20-, 30-, and 40-years that allows one to understand geological time, Deep Time, better.  With each turn of the page, new and varied creatures are revealed that were not known before and more details of the ancient physical oceanography of the California coast emerges with each new strata set that comes to the light of day.  Interacting with a single place over a large expanse

My dog Blackie and I taking a break from prospecting, The Point, 1980.

of time such as this can engage one in processes that are not visible in the day to day.  There is a larger periodicity of non-random dynamic processes that overlies a place such as this.  Some of those processes present themselves to me, others may only be inferred over even larger expanses of time, not known to a single life span.  I will end with a quote from one of my favorite authors, Pulitzer Prize winning Wallace Stegner

Rockfall 10.20 is a series of interconnected and developmentally related rockfalls, 2020.

who has written some of my most comforting literature on the American west.  I came to know Wallace, or rather his writing, through my father, who I did not really know at all in the sense of “father” since he past away when I was 5.  From a longing to know who my father was, I was introduced to Wallace, since my father and Wallace

grew up in the same small Canadian town together, Eastend, in the early 1900’s.  In reading the words of Stegner it allowed me to feel close to the father I never knew, and at the same time allowed me to learn an appreciation for a sense of place.  This is a quote from one of Wallace’s last essays, the year before he died at age 84; from “The

Sense of Place” by Wallace Stegner. Copyright 1992 by Wallace Stegner. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. “So I must believe that, at least to human perception, a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it – have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.”  I hope you all have a strong sense of place, wherever that may be, however diversified, however tangible or conceptual. In this particular place on Earth I am comforted, because it recalls the work of Wallace Stegner, who in turn certainly knew my father, and by such circuitous routes I, too, can know my father.

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