S A F Palm Springs Fifteen

The San Andreas Fault is a place where two tectonic plates touch, the North American and Pacific Plates. The plates are rigid (or almost rigid) slabs... more

by Tina M Wenger

Title

S A F Palm Springs Fifteen

Artist

Tina M Wenger

Medium

Photograph - Prints Of Photographs

Description

The San Andreas Fault is a place where two tectonic plates touch, the North American and Pacific Plates. The plates are rigid (or almost rigid) slabs of rock that comprise the crust and upper mantle of the Earth. The SAF is about 700 miles long as the crow flies and about 800 miles long when its curves are measured. It is roughly ten miles deep, and reaches from the Salton Sea in Imperial county to Cape Mendocino in Humboldt county.
The plates are continually moving but where the touch each other, they get stuck. As the rest of the plates moves, the stuck parts deform like compressing a spring so they build up stress in the rocks along the fault. When the rock breaks or slips, the suddenly plates move, causing an earthquake. The entire process is called elastic rebound. As they break and scrape by one another, they produce seismic waves that travel through the ground and shake the surface. We know this shaking as earthquakes. While we think of plates as rigid, they can stretch a little, like pizza crust. That is why we can have an earthquake on the SAF in northern California but not on the SAF in southern California.

Uploaded

August 19th, 2014