The San Francisco Bay Area Portal

The San Francisco Bay Area, also known as the Bay Area, is a geographically diverse metropolitan region that traditionally consists of nine counties which surround the San Francisco Bay in Northern California. The region extends northward to Healdsburg, about 145 miles (233 km) from Gilroy near the Bay Area's southern extreme. Antioch lies to the east, about 50 miles (80 km) from the Pacific Ocean. Unlike a typical metropolitan area, the Bay Area contains several distinct urban and suburban centers. San Francisco is the traditional financial and cultural center of the Bay Area, though San Jose has since 1990 been the region's most populous city. Oakland is the region's third-largest population center. The nine counties are frequently subdivided into several distinct groupings. The North Bay includes the counties of Marin, Sonoma, Napa, and Solano; the East Bay encompasses Alameda and Contra Costa counties; the Peninsula refers to San Mateo County; and the South Bay, occupies Santa Clara County. The City and County of San Francisco, referred to simply as The City, is considered another region in its own right. Within these regions lies the Silicon Valley, a sort of sub-region of its own which approximately corresponds to northwestern Santa Clara County, and parts of far southeastern San Mateo County.

The San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland combined statistical area also includes Santa Cruz and San Benito County, with parts of Mendocino, Lake, Yolo, San Joaquin and Monterey Counties sometimes considered part of a greater SFBA.

The Bay Area is home to more than seven million people, features an economy with a thriving high technology sector, world-class universities, and one of the bigger ports on the West Coast. Military bases, airports, cultural institutions and various local and national parks are sprawled over the area and connected by a network of highways, and mass transit systems. (more...)

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The Hayward Fault Zone is a geologic fault zone capable of generating significantly destructive earthquakes, throughout the foothills on the eastern shore of the San Francisco Bay. It is parallel to its more famous (and much longer) neighbor, the San Andreas Fault, which lies offshore and through the San Francisco peninsula. Further east still lies the Calaveras Fault and beyond that the Clayton-Marsh Creek-Greenvile Fault and their northern and southern extensions via other faults, while the San Gregorio Fault extends along the shoreline and offshore to the south of San Francisco. The nearest aligned fault to the north, the Rodgers Creek Fault, is considered by many to be an extension of the Hayward Fault Zone

These five fault structures are the major known active slip-strike faults associated with the relative motion of the Pacific Plate to the North American Plate in California at the latitude of the San Francisco Bay Area. (more...)

Previously: Joshua Abraham Norton - Sonoma Mountain - Google

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• San Francisco lies in ruins after the 1906 earthquake and fire.

Did you know...

• ...that the former fur trading outpost of Fort Ross was the southernmost Russian installation in North America?

• ...that the Pentium chip (pictured) was so named because Intel was unable to trademark numbers such as 386, 486, 586?
• ...that Scott McKenzie's hippie anthem San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair) was written by John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas to promote the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival?
• ...that BART and Amtrak share the Richmond rail station, connecting the Bay Area with Sacramento and the Central Valley?

Quotes

“

And the Bears!! The Bears have won! The Bears have won! Oh, my God! The most amazing, sensational, dramatic, heart-rending...exciting, thrilling finish in the history of college football!

”

~ Cal announcer Joe Starkey after The Play ended the 1982 Big Game

• more quotes from Wikiquote

Regions of the Bay Area

Related Portals

California

Central Valley

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