- As part of a mission to map the largely uncharted ocean’s seafloor, an autonomous boat from Alameda company Saildrone used SONAR to find a previously undiscovered 3,300-foot-tall underwater mountain off the California coast. It’s not exactly an unexpected finding, given that so much of the ocean hasn’t been explored and that mountains are a common result of seismic activity in the Pacific, but it’s still “a nice discovery,” Andrew Fisher, marine science professor at UC Santa Cruz, told the Chronicle. [Chronicle]
- A 3.1-M tremor shook Humbolt County around 9 a.m. Saturday morning, according to the United States Geological Survey, after an earthquake hit about 50 miles southwest off the coast of Eureka. Scientists said that it’s likely an(other) aftershock from the damaging 6.4-magnitude quake that hit the region at the end of December. [Mercury News]
- An unhoused Berkeley resident was arrested and charged with allegedly stealing and drinking altar wine and dressing himself in choir robes from a local church, authorities said this week. The incident apparently occurred in November, and the man was linked to it from DNA evidence because he had prior convictions [Mercury News]
- A serious fire in Contra Costa county started in a senior housing complex on Saturday, displacing an unknown number of residents and injuring one. The cause of the blaze is still under investigation. [ABC7]
- A 36-year-old Oakland man, Kenneth Orlando Sparks, was found guilty of trafficking a teenage victim and producing child pornography, and now faces life in prison, federal prosecutors said this week. [Mercury News]
- The Chronicle calculated the total number of San Francisco and Silicon Valley tech job losses in January and February — a whopping 11,300. [Chronicle]
Image via NOAA.
