California is known for its beaches – beaches, palm trees and surf are the iconic images that come to mind when people hear the word California, and the beaches around my town of Santa Barbara are no exception to this. But on my local beach (Arroyo Burro Beach) I believe I’ve found something in the cliffs that I bet few other Californian beaches have, and that’s the remains of another beach that existed there some 10 million years ago. INCLUDES VIDEO
Ripples from the Past
I spotted the ripple patterns while scrambling over an outcrop of rock that cut me off at high tide. The angle of the sunlight must have been just right that day. Early morning or evening light catches the peaks and leavesthe troughs in the shadow, making them visible as undulating patterns on an otherwise smooth rock layer. With each pounding winter storm a little bit more of the outcrop crumbles away and the ripples go with it, disappearing into the Pacific Ocean to become part the cycle of erosion and deposition that’s been happening since the Earth had continents and weather.
Since then it’s become a habit of mine to stop and sit a while on the outcrop. Running my hand across the rippled surface I touch the past – a day on a beach millions of years ago when these rocks were not the hard layers of stone they are today, but soft sand deposited and shaped in a familiar way by the ocean’s ebb and flow. Sitting there I couldn’t help but wonder what the world was like back then. Was it a sunny day when the sea left these ripples in the sand? If I had lived back then would I have had to wear sunscreen? What would I have found living in the ocean, flying through the air, wading on the shore or running on the land?
VIDEO: Life’s a Million Year Old Beach
The Miocene in Mind
Geologists call that time the Miocene epoch. The Miocene–aged cliffs on my beach are part of a huge deposit called the Monterrey Shale formation. The Miocene happened between 10 and 20 million years ago; millions of years after the dinosaurs had disappeared from the Earth making room for mammals to evolve. In those millions of years of mammalian evolution many of the creatures that are the ancestors of our companions today came into existence – whales, sea lions, dolphins, ducks, owls and early horses – and flourished in Miocene times.
If I could travel back in time I don’t think I would find the Miocene such a strange world. In fact, the fossilized ripple marks tell me I would probably feel right at home taking my morning run on a Miocene beach. I’d run on wet, rippled, intertidal sand with whales spouting offshore, sea lions basking in kelp beds, and birds pecking on the shore just like my beach today. Only the absence of my local cliffs, which back then would be the sand and mud under my feet (eventually to be turned into stone, ripple marks and all), would tell me this was not my time.
