X-Nico

6 unusual facts about San Andreas fault


Eastern span replacement of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge

It had been known for over thirty years that a major earthquake on either of two nearby faults (the San Andreas and the Hayward) would destroy the major cantilever span.

Joe Deal

He continued photographing man's effect on the landscape in "The Fault Zone", which featured images combining human and geologic effects on the area surrounding the San Andreas Fault.

John Tuzo Wilson

He also conceived of the transform fault, a major plate boundary where two plates move past each other horizontally (e.g., the San Andreas Fault).

North American Plate

The Farallon Plate has almost completely subducted beneath the western portion of the North American Plate leaving that part of the North American Plate in contact with the Pacific Plate as the San Andreas Fault.

The westerly boundary is the Queen Charlotte Fault running offshore along the coast of Alaska and the Cascadia subduction zone to the north, the San Andreas Fault through California, the East Pacific Rise in the Gulf of California, and the Middle America Trench to the south.

Water Is for Washing

: "You've heard about the 1905 flood, when the Colorado River spilled over and formed the Salton Sea? But don't be too sure about quakes; valleys below sea level don't just grow — something has to cause them. The San Andreas Fault curls around this valley like a question mark. Just imagine the shake-up it must have taken to drop thousands of square miles below the level of the Pacific."


Gulf of California Rift Zone

The Gulf of California Rift Zone (GCRZ) is the northernmost extension of the East Pacific Rise which extends some 1300 km from the mouth of the Gulf of California to the southern terminus of the San Andreas Fault at the Salton Sink.

Marine terrace

An especially prominent marine terraced coastline can be found north of Santa Cruz, near Davenport, California, where terraces probably have been raised by repeated slip earthquakes on the San Andreas Fault.

Tanya Atwater

Tanya Atwater (born August 27, 1942) is a retired American geophysicist and marine geologist who specialized in plate tectonics, in particular the evolution of the San Andreas fault plate boundary.

Transverse Ranges

The Transverse Ranges represent a complex of tectonic forces and faulting stemming from the interaction of the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate along the San Andreas Fault system.


see also

South Fork Eel River

The steep terrain in the South Fork Eel's watershed is the result of continuous uplift along the San Andreas Fault, and coinciding with the erosion caused by the river and its tributaries, steep canyons and ridges, many with slopes of over 50 percent, were formed.