Photographs below are of Kirby Cove near a low slack tide (NOAA San Francisco Tide Data). We saw a sail boat tacking, waiting just west of the bridge for slack tide. It was being carried out to sea despite that it was sailing into the gate. In the first picture below, you can see the turbulence of the current in the center of the strait. Impressive.

Equally impressive was the intertidal zone (MBARI’s results for search on intertidal zone) that was exposed. If I were working at Industrial Light and Magic, the giant green anemones (Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Online Field Guide: giant green anemones) would definitely be my model for some sort of alien life form. Totally cool.

Photos 2-5 below show ribbon chert, a sure sign of this particular parcel of sea floor’s 200 million year or so journey from a mid-ocean rift to the trench (now defunct here, but still active in Oregon and Washington) at North America’s Pacific edge.

Kirby Cove is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 1:17 pm and is filed under California, General, San Francisco. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.