5 ms·

The Lone Volcano in California's Central Valley

65 points by benbreen 3y ago

throwup238 3y ago
https://archive.ph/fsXSP https://archive.ph/fsXSP https://web.archive.org/web/20240322034212/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/us/the-lone-volcano-in-californias-central-valley.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240322034212/https://www.nytim...
pfdietz 3y ago
Geology Hub on this feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rmfi2JaThSE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rmfi2JaThSE
dws 3y ago
There's a vineyard in that area, Sobon Estates, that has a unique feature. If you look up into the vineyard from the winery, there's a dividing line between volcanic soil and alluvial soil. The same varietal of grape produces a noticeably different wine depending on which side of the line it was grown on.
- lisper 3y ago
  Do they actually market their wines that way? I thought it would make an interesting comparison, but when I looked on their web site I didn't see any indication of which wine came from which type of soil. (I'm a wine aficionado who happens to believe that most wine marketing is BS. I'm particularly skeptical of terroir, so a chance to do a proper controlled experiment would be really interesting.)
  - colechristensen 3y ago
    My position on wine BS is that it comes from two sources: 1. Lack of a robust language to describe taste and smell 2. Variation between people in taste and smell sensitivity levels for individual flavor/smell compounds. It’s like how it would be difficult to talk about color if there were thousands of different kinds of colorblindness and everybody was randomly one kind. You have to train yourself for a very long time to isolate and identify the many many different flavored compounds and then when you do there isn’t any universal language to have a conversation about them. The terroir business is similar. Clearly fruit grown in very different places tastes very different, anybody can experience this. When it comes to the fine details though the signal to noise goes way down because of the same lack of language and taste consistency. Add on the people trying to appear like they know what they’re talking about and you get this mass of nonsense which is very loosely connected with reality.
    - jojobas 3y ago
      The same professional taster will at times assign different ratings and features to five glasses poured from the same bottle, and they consistently give typical red wine characteristics to white wine with added odourless tasteless dye. It's 90% bullshit science and 10% basic measurable characteristics. Interesting how in the beer industry it's much less bullshity, with multiple characteristics objectively measured both at raw materials stage (hops alpha/beta acid content, essential oil etc, yeast alcohol limit , malt diastatic power) and different stages of beer production (wort specific gravity, fermentation progress etc).
    - eszed 3y ago
      Agree with everything you say. Wine experts do try to use a common vocabulary, but it's a bit of the competing standards problem [relevant XKCD goes here]. Most of the wine training I received working in the restaurant industry was vocab words to generate up-sells, and most amateur wine snobs don't know enough not to fall for it. I did have a fascinating experience, a bit more than twenty years ago, which pulled back a curtain onto a more interesting reality. I was working in private dining for a winery, one of the perks of which was getting to take home quite a bit of wine and food. One time I got offered the leftovers from a vertical tasting - that's every vintage of a particular wine - from their top-end estate-grown bottling. It was 15-20 bottles, I can't remember exactly, all half to three-quarters full. Anyway, we decided to do it properly, and tasted them all blind. (I mean, how often do you get a chance to do that with close to five retail figures of wine? Most of us were in wine or food or associated industries, anyway, so it was going to be a good story, and bragging rights, if nothing else.) I think there were six or eight of us - me, my flatmate, the three girls from next door, and a couple of hangers on - and we all (without conferring) agreed on the three best vintages. Some of us ranked them ABC, some BCA, etc, but it was those three in all cases. I went back to work a few days later, and told the wine maker 1) Thank you, and 2) you might be interested to know, blah blah blah. His immediate response? Oh, yeah, it was years ABC, wasn't it? Which it exactly was. So, there's a lot of wine bullshit, but not all of it is.
      - fragmede 3y ago
        Xkcd 927
  - dws 3y ago
    I don't know it they market this way. I learned it at the winery, from someone who clearly loved the wine. It was a, "Try these two. Taste the difference?" thing, followed by the story. And then you walk outside the tasting room, look up at the hill, and see it.
  - prawn 3y ago
    It's not that it's bullshit, it's more that it's possible that you are not able to discern or inclined to care or a combination. And it is perfectly reasonable and something that everyone does for most things they consume or use - beer, food, films, cars, sound, furnishings, etc. For countless categories, you can keep it practical or you can delve further. With a film, you can just watch things and like or not like them, or you can pay close attention to particular directors or techniques in structuring a story or presenting a visual. I do think though that if you have even a passing interest in wine, and are likely to drink wine through your adult life, that a quick course to become familiar with it unlocks something in what you get from it - identifying varieties, faults, etc.
    - lisper 3y ago
      > it's possible that you are not able to discern or inclined to care or a combination I definitely care. I started a wine tasting group thirty years ago with the person who is now my wife, and today we have several hundred bottles in our cellar. We're not hard-core winos, but we definitely enjoy it, and know our way around a wine list. It's possible that there's something wrong with my taste buds, though I can definitely tell the difference between different wines. I'm no master somme, but I've tried a lot of different wines from a lot of different places over a lot of different years. From what I've been able to glean from my data, the difference in regional flavors has a lot more to do with wine making technique and climate than terroir, which is why I would welcome the opportunity to do a controlled experiment.
      - prawn 3y ago
        Further, perhaps quite a lot of marketing is certainly exaggerated and I wonder how wine gets singled out. Think about how feminine hygiene products are marketed with frolicking white-dressed women, or cars tearing across the landscape, Apple tech, sports drinks, fashion. Here are some phrases from just one particular hiking shoe! Mud Contragrip® outsole with chevron lugs EnergyCell midsole Moulded Ortholite sockliner Sensifit™ system cradles the foot Advanced Chassis insert !
      - werdnapk 3y ago
  - hammock 3y ago
    In your experience, what makes you so skeptical of terroir? As a naive enthusiast, it makes sense to me that drainage, at the very least, would impact the way the fruits grow , and fruit yield, impacting the final product thusly. A large watermelon and small watermelon from the same vine/garden have different flavor
    - lisper 3y ago
      Yes, I agree that theoretically it kind of makes sense, but I've gathered a lot of data over the years and the best predictor of quality that I've found is the wine maker. We've had it happen a number of times now that a wine that we really liked suddenly started tasting different, and it turned out that the wine maker had changed. So this is a confounding factor. I really like California reds, but mostly from Napa, Sonoma and Paso Robles. Is that because of the terroir? Or the climate? Or the varietals? Or because there's a community of wine makers that all copy each other? It's really hard to tease these apart.
seany 3y ago
Surprised there isn't a mention of the Titan silo complex there.
hyperific 3y ago
I've driven by these before and they're so strange to see amid such flat surroundings.
- xeromal 3y ago
  You might appreciate my picture of Stone Mountain near Atlanta, GA for a similar feel. https://imgur.com/a/NcBtroN https://imgur.com/a/NcBtroN
beej71 3y ago
There's also a slice of marine sediment in there along Pass Rd, turned up as the volcano poked through. There are natural gas wells along it. The Middle Mountain Foundation used to organize hikes in the mountains which were fantastic. Not sure if they still do. Only a small part of the Buttes are publicly owned.
Linda231 3y ago
[dead]
davidw 3y ago
I've driven by that on I-5 a number of times. Another one that jumped out at me were the cinder cones north of St George Utah. We were driving through to go to Zion National Park, which is not at all volcanic looking in terms of the formations, so it was quite odd to see some volcanic stuff that would look perfectly normal here in central Oregon.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  That's in the Basin and Range province (most of Nevada is in this province). It's a zone of crustal extension, with the crust being pulled apart on an east-west axis. This leads to the characteristic horst and graben geography, with valleys interspersed with mountains. It also means the crust has become thinner. This has brought hot rocks closer to the surface, where some have melted due to decompression, allowing magma to flow up through all those normal faults, creating volcanism.
frereubu 3y ago
Google Maps satellite view: https://maps.app.goo.gl/hfQpWZVQRj22Avsd6 https://maps.app.goo.gl/hfQpWZVQRj22Avsd6 You can really see the flatlands around them and why they'd be a refuge in times of flooding.
NelsonMinar 3y ago
There's a state park there, or at least one under development. There's no public access to the park land yet. https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=23452 https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=23452 Some more history of the park effort: https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=23786 https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=23786 A map of the park land: https://mapcarta.com/26856230 https://mapcarta.com/26856230
hammock 3y ago
Shasta does not count? Isn't it at the end of the central valley/ start of the cascades?
- dividefuel 3y ago
  I don't think Shasta is considered part of the valley -- there are 20-30 miles of hills/mountains separating it from the northern end of the central valley (Redding).
- dunmalg 3y ago
  That far north is definitely outside the central valley. Once you travel north out of Redding, you're climbing up into the mountains, and it's 60 miles of that before you get to Shasta. Lassen is better candidate, since it actually erupted recently (1921) and is only ~40 miles east of Redding... but it's also part of the Cascade range like Shasta, which sn't really IN the valley.
dividefuel 3y ago
I grew up in one of the towns near the Sutter Buttes. They serve as a backdrop and are a key geographic feature of the area... but since they're privately owned and access is so limited, very few people have ever interacted with the area in any way. I can count on one hand the number of times I've been into the interior of the area (most/all via the Middle Mountain Foundation), but they've all been fun experiences. I especially recommend the North Butte hike -- on a clear day you can see pretty far!
xeromal 3y ago
https://imgur.com/a/NcBtroN https://imgur.com/a/NcBtroN Stone Mountain near Atlanta, GA evokes a similar bewilderment how it pops from the earth among a completely flag forest. I included a picture of the Atlanta skyline for a sense of scale.

65 points by benbreen 3y ago

https://archive.ph/fsXSP https://archive.ph/fsXSP https://web.archive.org/web/20240322034212/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/us/the-lone-volcano-in-californias-central-valley.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240322034212/https://www.nytim...

pfdietz 3y ago

Geology Hub on this feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rmfi2JaThSE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rmfi2JaThSE

dws 3y ago

There's a vineyard in that area, Sobon Estates, that has a unique feature. If you look up into the vineyard from the winery, there's a dividing line between volcanic soil and alluvial soil. The same varietal of grape produces a noticeably different wine depending on which side of the line it was grown on.

lisper 3y ago
Do they actually market their wines that way? I thought it would make an interesting comparison, but when I looked on their web site I didn't see any indication of which wine came from which type of soil. (I'm a wine aficionado who happens to believe that most wine marketing is BS. I'm particularly skeptical of terroir, so a chance to do a proper controlled experiment would be really interesting.)
- colechristensen 3y ago
  My position on wine BS is that it comes from two sources: 1. Lack of a robust language to describe taste and smell 2. Variation between people in taste and smell sensitivity levels for individual flavor/smell compounds. It’s like how it would be difficult to talk about color if there were thousands of different kinds of colorblindness and everybody was randomly one kind. You have to train yourself for a very long time to isolate and identify the many many different flavored compounds and then when you do there isn’t any universal language to have a conversation about them. The terroir business is similar. Clearly fruit grown in very different places tastes very different, anybody can experience this. When it comes to the fine details though the signal to noise goes way down because of the same lack of language and taste consistency. Add on the people trying to appear like they know what they’re talking about and you get this mass of nonsense which is very loosely connected with reality.
  - jojobas 3y ago
    The same professional taster will at times assign different ratings and features to five glasses poured from the same bottle, and they consistently give typical red wine characteristics to white wine with added odourless tasteless dye. It's 90% bullshit science and 10% basic measurable characteristics. Interesting how in the beer industry it's much less bullshity, with multiple characteristics objectively measured both at raw materials stage (hops alpha/beta acid content, essential oil etc, yeast alcohol limit , malt diastatic power) and different stages of beer production (wort specific gravity, fermentation progress etc).
  - eszed 3y ago
    Agree with everything you say. Wine experts do try to use a common vocabulary, but it's a bit of the competing standards problem [relevant XKCD goes here]. Most of the wine training I received working in the restaurant industry was vocab words to generate up-sells, and most amateur wine snobs don't know enough not to fall for it. I did have a fascinating experience, a bit more than twenty years ago, which pulled back a curtain onto a more interesting reality. I was working in private dining for a winery, one of the perks of which was getting to take home quite a bit of wine and food. One time I got offered the leftovers from a vertical tasting - that's every vintage of a particular wine - from their top-end estate-grown bottling. It was 15-20 bottles, I can't remember exactly, all half to three-quarters full. Anyway, we decided to do it properly, and tasted them all blind. (I mean, how often do you get a chance to do that with close to five retail figures of wine? Most of us were in wine or food or associated industries, anyway, so it was going to be a good story, and bragging rights, if nothing else.) I think there were six or eight of us - me, my flatmate, the three girls from next door, and a couple of hangers on - and we all (without conferring) agreed on the three best vintages. Some of us ranked them ABC, some BCA, etc, but it was those three in all cases. I went back to work a few days later, and told the wine maker 1) Thank you, and 2) you might be interested to know, blah blah blah. His immediate response? Oh, yeah, it was years ABC, wasn't it? Which it exactly was. So, there's a lot of wine bullshit, but not all of it is.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      Xkcd 927
- dws 3y ago
  I don't know it they market this way. I learned it at the winery, from someone who clearly loved the wine. It was a, "Try these two. Taste the difference?" thing, followed by the story. And then you walk outside the tasting room, look up at the hill, and see it.
- prawn 3y ago
  It's not that it's bullshit, it's more that it's possible that you are not able to discern or inclined to care or a combination. And it is perfectly reasonable and something that everyone does for most things they consume or use - beer, food, films, cars, sound, furnishings, etc. For countless categories, you can keep it practical or you can delve further. With a film, you can just watch things and like or not like them, or you can pay close attention to particular directors or techniques in structuring a story or presenting a visual. I do think though that if you have even a passing interest in wine, and are likely to drink wine through your adult life, that a quick course to become familiar with it unlocks something in what you get from it - identifying varieties, faults, etc.
  - lisper 3y ago
    > it's possible that you are not able to discern or inclined to care or a combination I definitely care. I started a wine tasting group thirty years ago with the person who is now my wife, and today we have several hundred bottles in our cellar. We're not hard-core winos, but we definitely enjoy it, and know our way around a wine list. It's possible that there's something wrong with my taste buds, though I can definitely tell the difference between different wines. I'm no master somme, but I've tried a lot of different wines from a lot of different places over a lot of different years. From what I've been able to glean from my data, the difference in regional flavors has a lot more to do with wine making technique and climate than terroir, which is why I would welcome the opportunity to do a controlled experiment.
    - prawn 3y ago
      Further, perhaps quite a lot of marketing is certainly exaggerated and I wonder how wine gets singled out. Think about how feminine hygiene products are marketed with frolicking white-dressed women, or cars tearing across the landscape, Apple tech, sports drinks, fashion. Here are some phrases from just one particular hiking shoe! Mud Contragrip® outsole with chevron lugs EnergyCell midsole Moulded Ortholite sockliner Sensifit™ system cradles the foot Advanced Chassis insert !
    - werdnapk 3y ago
- hammock 3y ago
  In your experience, what makes you so skeptical of terroir? As a naive enthusiast, it makes sense to me that drainage, at the very least, would impact the way the fruits grow , and fruit yield, impacting the final product thusly. A large watermelon and small watermelon from the same vine/garden have different flavor
  - lisper 3y ago
    Yes, I agree that theoretically it kind of makes sense, but I've gathered a lot of data over the years and the best predictor of quality that I've found is the wine maker. We've had it happen a number of times now that a wine that we really liked suddenly started tasting different, and it turned out that the wine maker had changed. So this is a confounding factor. I really like California reds, but mostly from Napa, Sonoma and Paso Robles. Is that because of the terroir? Or the climate? Or the varietals? Or because there's a community of wine makers that all copy each other? It's really hard to tease these apart.

seany 3y ago

Surprised there isn't a mention of the Titan silo complex there.

hyperific 3y ago

I've driven by these before and they're so strange to see amid such flat surroundings.

xeromal 3y ago
You might appreciate my picture of Stone Mountain near Atlanta, GA for a similar feel. https://imgur.com/a/NcBtroN https://imgur.com/a/NcBtroN

beej71 3y ago

There's also a slice of marine sediment in there along Pass Rd, turned up as the volcano poked through. There are natural gas wells along it. The Middle Mountain Foundation used to organize hikes in the mountains which were fantastic. Not sure if they still do. Only a small part of the Buttes are publicly owned.

Linda231 3y ago

[dead]

davidw 3y ago

I've driven by that on I-5 a number of times. Another one that jumped out at me were the cinder cones north of St George Utah. We were driving through to go to Zion National Park, which is not at all volcanic looking in terms of the formations, so it was quite odd to see some volcanic stuff that would look perfectly normal here in central Oregon.

pfdietz 3y ago
That's in the Basin and Range province (most of Nevada is in this province). It's a zone of crustal extension, with the crust being pulled apart on an east-west axis. This leads to the characteristic horst and graben geography, with valleys interspersed with mountains. It also means the crust has become thinner. This has brought hot rocks closer to the surface, where some have melted due to decompression, allowing magma to flow up through all those normal faults, creating volcanism.

frereubu 3y ago

Google Maps satellite view: https://maps.app.goo.gl/hfQpWZVQRj22Avsd6 https://maps.app.goo.gl/hfQpWZVQRj22Avsd6 You can really see the flatlands around them and why they'd be a refuge in times of flooding.

NelsonMinar 3y ago

There's a state park there, or at least one under development. There's no public access to the park land yet. https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=23452 https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=23452 Some more history of the park effort: https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=23786 https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=23786 A map of the park land: https://mapcarta.com/26856230 https://mapcarta.com/26856230

hammock 3y ago

Shasta does not count? Isn't it at the end of the central valley/ start of the cascades?

dividefuel 3y ago
I don't think Shasta is considered part of the valley -- there are 20-30 miles of hills/mountains separating it from the northern end of the central valley (Redding).
dunmalg 3y ago
That far north is definitely outside the central valley. Once you travel north out of Redding, you're climbing up into the mountains, and it's 60 miles of that before you get to Shasta. Lassen is better candidate, since it actually erupted recently (1921) and is only ~40 miles east of Redding... but it's also part of the Cascade range like Shasta, which sn't really IN the valley.

dividefuel 3y ago

I grew up in one of the towns near the Sutter Buttes. They serve as a backdrop and are a key geographic feature of the area... but since they're privately owned and access is so limited, very few people have ever interacted with the area in any way. I can count on one hand the number of times I've been into the interior of the area (most/all via the Middle Mountain Foundation), but they've all been fun experiences. I especially recommend the North Butte hike -- on a clear day you can see pretty far!

xeromal 3y ago

https://imgur.com/a/NcBtroN https://imgur.com/a/NcBtroN Stone Mountain near Atlanta, GA evokes a similar bewilderment how it pops from the earth among a completely flag forest. I included a picture of the Atlanta skyline for a sense of scale.