Bakersfield College geology professor Natalie Bursztyn was at the Levan Center on March 1 promoting her second printing of “The Geology of Kern County.”
Bursztyn is excited with the content of her book and is happy to be sharing it with the community.
“Things are finally expanding, after taking me two years to write,” said Bursztyn.
The 84-page publication includes her own pictures and diagrams of Kern County that emphasize tectonic actions of various locations around Red Rock Canyon, the Kern River Valley and desolate routes that run through Highway 58, Boron and the Mojave Desert.
Bursztyn claims that her text demonstrates the validity of the Plate Tectonics Theory that paleomagnetism is used to tell the “rewind time” of the geological history of plates.
“These tectonic plates, seven major and seven minor, are all in contact of each other and move in a motion that causes force and stress, thus leading to the deformation of the earth’s crust,” explained Bursztyn.
Tectonic plates are broken into small, brittle, eggshell-like pieces that makeup the outermost compositional layer of the earth’s crust, also known as the Lithosphere.
“Looking at plate tectonics and most of the world’s agricultural elements, we are able to determine from different crusts that everything we see as landscaped today was completely submerged underwater at one point,” said Bursztyn.
Bursztyn’s book also includes sketches of fossilization in her chapter about the paleontology of Kern County and the teeth that are found on Shark Tooth Hill.
“The most surprising thing to me that I found in the geology itself was the history of the Kern River,” said Bursztyn.
“I spent a long time thinking about the Kern River, and I actually spent a day or two with Jason Saleeby, who’s the geologist from Cal Tech, and we just patrolled around the area and picked up rocks, looked at rocks, talked about rocks and looked at maps, talked about maps, and try to generalize our ideas of the Kern River,”
Bursztyn’s journey has not only helped her broaden her studies but has also led to the findings of new artifacts and areas of agricultural terrain to use for her book.
“The photograph that wraps around the cover from side to side was taken looking west into Kern County and the neon sign that you see on the side of Highway 58 that says ‘rocks’, I thought was a great picture.
“You’re also seeing the area north of Tehachapi and north of Mojave,” said Bursztyn.
Bursztyn talks about the two geological settings of the solid, crystalline Sierra Nevada to the east and the loose sandy San Joaguin Valley to the west and includes the history of how Bakersfield developed its main waterways.
She accentuates her findings of obsidian rocks and Joshua trees that are commonly found throughout Kern County and live within the appropriate climate.
Bursztyn’s goal of this project is to give readers the understanding and the history behind Kern County’s geological system. The book will be available for checkout during the second week of March at the Grace Van Dyke Bird Library.