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Saturday, March 17, 2018

California Faults (can be seen from air)

One beautiful morning in 1994, in Los Angles, I was putting air to my car tires at the gas station. suddenly car started shaking. Shaking viciously side to side in my direction. I first thought someone was joking with me, so I went to the other side of the car to check. it was a Landers (geologists called it) earthquake. People normally called at Northridge earthquake. It was measured 6.4 richter scale  

The name of the San Andreas Fault precedes itself like, well, an immense and unavoidable rift in the earth’s surface. Running some 1,300 kilometres through the US state of California and reaching a depth of 15 to 20 kilometres, the San Andreas forms the tectonic boundary between the Pacific and North American Plates. Yet because of its vast size, it’s difficult to grasp this giant geological feature; except, that is, when you look at it from above.


The reason the San Andreas Fault is so famous – or perhaps infamous – is because of the major earthquakes for which it has been responsible. Names like the great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which left 3,000 dead, or 1989’s Loma Prieta earthquake, which killed 63, or Landers richter scale 6.4 earthquake in Northridge in 1994, leave some trembling at the thought of the next big one. Worrying, a study suggests that the fault is set for just such a super quake of magnitude 7.0 or over, with the risk rising faster than was previously believed

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