geological feature of the Northern California coast known as Bodega Head. Goat Beach lies below and slightly west of State Route 1. During the summer months, a sandbar is built up along the beach and separates the Russian River from the Pacific Ocean. This sandbar is breached whenever the water levels reach heights between at the Jenner visitor center. Breaching of the sandbar during late fall/early winter splits the beach in two sections. The northern section is protected by the Russian River flowing into the ocean and creates an ideal location for harbor seal pupping. The Russian River State Marine Reserve and Russian River State Marine Conservation Area protect the Russian River Estuary. Like underwater parks, these marine protected areas help conserve ocean and freshwater wildlife and marine ecosystems. Geology Goat Rock Beach is subject to continuing marine erosion as well as windborne erosion, thus creating a situation where an average of per year of land mass is lost, except for the hardest of outcrop formations. In winters of heavy storms, this value can be yet higher. Over the last geologic epoch the land has been subject to uplift, a process combined with marine erosion, which has created a marine terrace above the entire extent of the beach. This marine terrace elevation varies approximately above mean sea level, which results in a steep bluff directly above the littoral zone, and a succession of terrace levels. The sea stacks along the coast at Goat Rock Beach consist of rocks from the Franciscan Complex, formed within an era of plate collision along the western coast of North America. From about 200 to 30 million years ago, the North American Plate was in continual collision with the Farallon Plate. A variety of rock types resulted from this collision, including pillow basalt, chert, and marine sandstone. During the plate collisions, these rocks were considerably faulted and crushed into melange, which is a mixture of ground-up matrix and resistant pockets of rock floating within. When melange is eroded by wave action, the softer part of the matrix is washed away, leaving the more resistant blocks exposed in the ocean as sea stacks. Goat Rock is such a flat topped sea stack consisting of a block of resistant greywacke. Vertical sea stack formations, a geological hallmark of this shoreline, appear standing out of the water or on the beach resembling sculptures. Occasionally these stacks appear on