In the last three days there have been over 200 earth- quakes centered along the San Andreas Fault between Mexicali and Guadalupe Victoria. Most have been minor, magnitudes between 2 and 4, but there have been two moderate sized tremors.Earthquake swarms like these are not uncommon, they happen somewhere along the San Andreas every couple of years, and they are not normally predictive of a super-quake. Still, it is sobering when the San Andreas Fault gets particularly feisty.
California is weirder than most people know. The whole of North America is on one tectonic plate, aptly enough named the North American Plate. All, that is, except for a narrow strip of land stretching from San Francisco to the tip of Baja California; we got a different tectonic plate. While the rest of the continent is moving in one direction, we here in California are stubbornly going the exact opposite direction.
Day after day, more people come to L.A.
Ssh! Don't you tell anybody the whole place is slipping away.
Where can we go when there's no San Francisco?
Ssh! Better get ready to tie up the boat in Idaho. ~ Day After Day, Shango, 1968 (sung to a calypso beat)
2 comments:
You may enjoy reading John McPhee's excellent Assembling California
I very much like many of his other books, especially The Control of Nature, Conversations With The Archdruid, Rising From The Plains, and Coming Into The Country
those days were something else. it was earthquake after earthquake after earthquake, listening to the earth crack and coping with the idea that the next one was going to be a big one.
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