Recently, I had the pleasure of visiting San Bernardino County, California. A quick look at the county's geologic map (Figure 1) illustrates its array of geological complexities. During my visit, I recognized the county's highly diverse geologic and physical features. As evidenced in Figure 2, San Bernardino County is home to the Peninsular Ranges, Transverse Ranges, and the Mojave Desert. Depicted in Figure 3, San Bernardino County also includes the San Gabriel Mountains, San Bernardino Mountains, Mill Creek, and the Peninsular Ranges assemblages which are all basement rock assemblages. Furthermore, geologic forces such as bounding and falling (landslides of rocks and/or other material/debris) of said basement rock assemblages occurred as a result of the area's several seismically active fault zones. These zones include the San Andreas, San Jacinto, Elsinore, Whittier, Cucamonga, and Sierra Madre Faults and are all depicted in Figure 3 as well. Moreover, the county includes various types of rocks from the Pleistocene-Holocene age which are Quaternary deposits (i.e. alluvium, lake, playa, terrace deposits, etc.).
Although I enjoyed visiting San Bernardino County, California, there are several pieces of information I would request in order to properly study the area. First, I would prefer information regarding the county's seismic activity to understand just how active its faults are and how they might have impacted the modern-day county's landscape and composition. For this reason, I also think it would be helpful to have some sort of aerial footage of the area, specifically the areas near the county's faults, to see the landscape's change over time and sediment deposits since these deposits are important in understanding its geologic time. And, in line with geologic time, I would like some record of the county's fossils to not only understand previous life forms, but also previous environmental conditions and a more accurate time indicator for the rocks' ages.
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