As tectonic plates slip past each other, the rivers that cross fault lines change shape. The shifting ground stretches the river channels until the water breaks its course and flows onto new paths.
Earth Sciences
Jul 8, 2021
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Rock-melting forces occurring much deeper in the Earth than previously understood appear to drive tremors along a notorious segment of California's San Andreas Fault, according to new USC research that helps explain how quakes ...
Earth Sciences
Sep 4, 2020
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348
Much of what we understand about earthquakes is based on plate tectonics. But for residents of Utah's seismically restless Wasatch Front, a 120-mile-long metropolitan region anchored by Salt Lake City and bounded by the steep ...
Earth Sciences
Aug 26, 2015
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Earthquakes are labeled "shallow" if they occur at less than 50 kilometers depth. They are labeled "deep" if they occur at 300-700 kilometers depth. When slippage occurs during these earthquakes, the faults weaken. How this ...
Earth Sciences
May 18, 2015
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Winter rains and summer groundwater pumping in California's Central Valley make the Sierra Nevada and Coast Mountain Ranges sink and rise by a few millimeters each year, creating stress on the state's faults that could increase ...
Earth Sciences
May 14, 2014
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Stanford scientists are using weak vibrations generated by the Earth's oceans to produce "virtual earthquakes" that can be used to predict the ground movement and shaking hazard to buildings from real quakes.
Earth Sciences
Jan 23, 2014
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(Phys.org) —The Isabella anomaly—indications of a large mass of cool, dehydrated material about 100 kilometers beneath central California—is in fact a surviving slab of the Farallon oceanic plate. Most of the Farallon ...
Earth Sciences
Mar 18, 2013
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(Phys.org)—Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have come a step closer to deciphering some of the basic mysteries and mechanisms behind earthquakes and how average-sized earthquakes may evolve ...
Earth Sciences
Aug 29, 2012
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Most earthquakes that are seen, heard, and felt around the world are caused by fast slip on faults. While the earthquake rupture itself can travel on a fault as fast as the speed of sound or better, the fault surfaces behind ...
Earth Sciences
Oct 13, 2011
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(PhysOrg.com) -- In a bit of coincidental news, no sooner had earthquake scientists posted warnings about the instability of the southern part of the San Andreas Fault hidden beneath the Salton Sea, than an earthquake struck; ...
The San Andreas Fault is a continental transform fault that runs a length of roughly 800 miles (1,300 km) through California in the United States. The fault's motion is right-lateral strike-slip (horizontal motion). It forms the tectonic boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate.
The fault was first identified in Northern California by UC Berkeley geology professor Andrew Lawson in 1895 and named by him after a small lake which lies in a linear valley formed by the fault just south of San Francisco, the Laguna de San Andreas. Following the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, it was Lawson who also discovered that the San Andreas Fault stretched well southward into Southern California.
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