Oakland Geology

Lakeside Park holds a scattering of boulders and plaques. The plaques are always interesting, and sometimes so are the boulders. This one sits at the west side of Bandstand Cove by a grove of redwood and oak trees. I can tell at a glance — the greenish color, even texture and lack of sedimentary fabric — that this rock consists of metamorphosed lava, informally called greenstone. There’s a lot of it in the Coast Range. There’s also some in the Sierra foothills, and I suspect that this was quarried over there.

One side of the boulder displays a nice slickenside, a sign that the rock was cracked and wrung underground.

Emily Brodsky down at UC Santa Cruz studies these fault surfaces and has been finding deep clues in them (see the latest paper from her team).

Elsewhere the boulder shows stretch marks — little extensional fractures filled with quartz. Like a run in a stocking, these are evidence of the stresses that affected this body of material once upon a time. Since the boulder has been ripped out of its original setting, these scrape marks and stretch marks have lost their geological meaning, but they’re still pretty.

Oh yeah, the boulder has a message on it. The plaque announces that the three fountains in Lake Merritt were installed or renovated by Madeleine and Andrew Wong as a gift to the people of Oakland.

The plaque in the photo, circa 2016, was stolen and has since been replaced.

And not least among its functions, the boulder punctuates the most peaceful view on the whole lake, whether the fountain is running or not.

Lake Merritt needs a lot of human management to stay clean and pleasant, and the fountains are a key part of that.