It’s All in the Small Picture

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO — Paleontologist Ed Marks looked into the bottom of a Huntington Beach water well a few years back and saw something few others would recognize: evidence of an ancient mountaintop mixed in with microscopic fossils from a prehistoric ocean floor, and a time when sequoias grew--in a much cooler climate--in what is now Orange County.

That peculiar visual ability of his has helped the Orange County Water District map freshwater aquifers that flow hundreds of feet below ground. And it’s also helping explain some imponderably slow but radical changes in the Earth’s surface.

More compelling, though, might be the role that Marks plays in his Micropals seminars at the Orange County Natural History Museum in San Juan Capistrano, where twice a month he helps youngsters explore a world of miniatures that hold keys to the Earth’s past.

On a recent Saturday, half a dozen youngsters filtered through the museum on the basement level of the Franciscan Plaza, cater-corner from Mission San Juan Capistrano. The museum has an unsettled, unfinished feel to it, with its black-painted ceiling and exposed pipes. Glass cases display hints of Orange County nature, including a live diamondback rattlesnake and other reptiles and amphibians living in corner terrariums.

But it’s the dead that hold the interest today.

“Why are we doing this? Why are we spending all this time?,” Marks asked youngsters at work along a row of microscopes. He waited a moment, then answered his own question with barely contained glee: “Because these are creatures you kiddies would never see.”

For Aaron Valentino, 13, of Dana Point, the morning was a chance to find the unexpected among the commonplace: microscopic shells in a small dish of ordinary beach sand.

“I’ve found a couple sponge spines, a few snails,” he said as he peered through a 24-power microscope. “I’m looking for things--I forget what they’re called. I just like finding stuff.”

Outside the Micropals program, Marks’ work bridges the distant past and the present. Many of the microscopic creatures he studies exist much the same as they did 2 million years ago, serving both as fossils and live specimens.

Marks pursues the fossilized versions like a detective, using them as tiny clues that, when read properly, tell of grand geologic change, no matter that they were dredged from a water well in the heart of the Santa Ana River flood plain.

“These little creatures tell us two things,” Marks said. “Many of them are index fossils, which means they lived for a very short period of time in geologic history, and lived in a wide area. That makes them very important because we can tell the age of the rock from them. The other thing that they tell me is the habitat of the rocks in which they lived. In other words, did they live in 100 feet, 600 feet or over 600 feet in the abyss of the ocean?”

The microscopic fossils help Marks undo time, indicating how the terrain of modern Orange County has come to be. The science is known as stratigraphy, and it has been used for decades by oil companies to map subterranean oil fields.

It’s also being used by the Orange County Water District, which hired Marks about five years ago for a yearlong project reading the tea leaves of tracings from wells in Huntington Beach, near the intersection of Beach Boulevard and McFadden Avenue; in Garden Grove; and in Anaheim, northeast of Disneyland.

Ground water percolates into the aquifer through natural basins along the Santa Ana River and in Anaheim and Santa Ana Canyon. Marks’ work has helped district officials visualize the unseeable.

“It deals with underground mapping,” said Jim Van Haun, the water district’s associate general manager. Mapping the layers of sediment “helps us better understand where water goes after it sinks into the basin.”

The wells that Marks studied range from 1,500 feet to 2,000 feet deep--shallow by well standards, but deep enough to go back in time 100 million years.

Oddly, the deeper the wells went, Marks found, the younger the rock sediment he found, a seeming reversal of time.

What happened, he explained, was that while the land evolved, erosion planed off the exposed tops of the mountains and deposited the sediment, in reverse order, in the Santa Ana River flood plain. Thus Marks was finding rock types formed 85 million years ago mixed into sediment bearing microscopic fossils, pollen and moss spores from 300,000 years ago.

“We also found in the bottom of the well, in the late Pliocene (2 million years ago), remains of sequoias,” Marks said. “They don’t live here now, which means that when they lived here it must have been much cooler.”

Marks is just as fascinated by the present incarnations of those ancient living things. They form a bizarrely beautiful world defined by exotic names like pseudopodia and bolivina, briazoans and ostracods.

“Ostracods look like little jellybeans, but microscopic in size,” said Marks, who talks about his work in a passionate flow of words. “They’re related to shrimp and lobsters. They’re crustaceans. They have two little shells, carapaces, and through the bottom of the thing come their little legs. They walk along and they have a little eye. They’re pretty little things.”

Some of them look more like Steven Spielberg creations than fragments of nature.

“Some of them have very delicate spines coming off them, pseudopodia, where the protoplasm flows,” Marks said. “They act as a kind of spider web. When a smaller animal manages to hit against it, the protoplasm captures the little thing and slowly digests it and takes it into the system.”

Marks’ ability to make such natural happenings easy to understand, and his personal ebullience over the subject, help fuel Micropals’ success, said Jacki Hanson, director of volunteers for the all-volunteer museum.

“He’s quite a character,” said Hanson. “He’s very entertaining. A dull teacher can kill any subject, and his enthusiasm and his knowledge really provide a spark.”

There’s also a certain appeal to a sedentary study of sediment.

“Fossil hunting is so much easier when you can just sit there and look through a microscope,” said Hanson, a nurse and owner of Jason Data Services in Lake Forest. “When you’re out walking over the hills, it’s a lot of hard work.”

But for Andrew Berg, 7, of Capistrano Beach, the fun was in the hunt. He used the sharpened end of a small paintbrush to sort shells from sand beneath his microscope as Marks hopped from seat to seat, identifying shells that, to the naked eye, looked merely like countless grains of sand.

“I like the shells and stuff, and the fossils,” Berg said. “I like finding stuff.”

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Under the Microscope

Interested in attending the Micropals seminar? Here’s what you need to know:

When: Meets every other Saturday (Feb. 8 and 22), 10 a.m. to noon

Where: Orange County Natural History Museum

Address: Franciscan Plaza, 31781 Camino Capistrano, Suite 205, San Juan Capistrano

Cost: Free to museum members; charge for class would be cost of museum membership ($10 for students, $35 for family)

More information: Ed Marks at (562) 945-7606

Classes emphasize small picture

Source: Orange County Natural History Museum