A Newsletter for the Neighbors of the University of California, Berkeley |
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Visiting the "Forces that Shape the Bay'
at LHS
By Diane Ainsworth and Janet Huseby On a very clear day, standing high in the Berkeley Hills, it is possible to squint one’s eyes, stare beyond the Golden Gate Bridge, and sight the Farallon Islands 26 miles off the California coast. The small rocky islands seem almost to float in the blue Pacific Ocean, an illusion visitors to the Lawrence Hall of Science’s new exhibit, “Forces that Shape the Bay,” will find is not far from fact. Slowly, the islands are moving north at an average rate of two inches a year. It is not only the Farallons that are transient. Fifteen thousand years ago, during the last ice age, San Francisco Bay itself wasn’t here. The shoreline was 25 miles west of San Francisco, beyond the Farallons. Sea level was 300 feet lower than it is today, and temperatures were colder by as much as 18 degrees Fahrenheit. Large camels, mammoths, ground sloths, and other mammals, now extinct, roamed broad inland valleys that later became the bay basin. But as the Ice Age ended, the ocean flooded through the Golden Gate, says geologist Ian Carmichael, former director of the Lawrence Hall of Science and the inspiration behind the recently opened $2.5-million exhibit. Over thousands of years, sea level rose to its current mark, creating the San Francisco Peninsula and filling the bay. To understand the forces — such as water, plate tectonics, and mountain building — that created and continue to shape San Francisco Bay, there’s no better vantage point than a site that overlooks that picture-perfect stretch of the Northern California coastline. Carmichael’s brain child — a permanent, outdoor learning-lab with hands-on, interactive displays of nature’s giant sculpting tools — was built on the south terrace of Lawrence Hall of Science and opened to acclaim in June. “Lawrence Hall of Science has the most magnificent view of San Francisco Bay, and yet, when you stand there, there’s nothing to tell anybody how the bay came to be or how it’s going to evolve,” Carmichael said. “The fact that you can walk out there and see 12,000 years of geological evolution is not obvious to anybody at all.” The exhibit rectifies that. With $500,000 in seed money from the UC Berkeley Class of 1948, the Lawrence Hall of Science sought private and public support for the one-acre outdoor exhibit. It secured a generous donation from the East Bay Municipal Utility District and then received a $1.5-million grant from the National Science Foundation for educational programs and exhibits. All summer, visitors have been wending their way up to the hall to climb on moving tectonic plates, build mountains in huge sandboxes, and splash in the cool waters of the exhibit. During the fall and winter, busloads of sixth-grade students studying geology, plate tectonics, earthquakes, and volcanoes will make the trek. Now is a good time for the rest of us — with or without children — to follow. The exhibit site features not only hands-on play and instruction but also grass, picnic benches, and the best view of the San Francisco Bay short of an airplane ride. The Lawrence Hall of Science is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $4.50 for children, $6.50 for students and seniors, and $8.50 for adults. For details, visit lawrencehallofscience.org
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