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January 16, 2014
Two decades since L.A.’s Northridge earthquake
It’s already been twenty years since Los Angeles was last really rocked by an earthquake. The 4:31am Northridge temblor, a magnitude 6.7 that literally threw the city from its sleep, was the iconic natural disaster of the 1990s and the last in a string of quakes, fires, and mudslides to pummel Los Angeles in the early half of the decade. Though violent, destructive, and memorable, the Northridge quake struck merely …
October 18, 2011
Loma Prieta earthquake anniversary
Twenty two years ago this very day the San Francisco Giants were preparing to play their cross-bay rivals, the Oakland Athletics, in the 1989 World Series–the so-called Battle of the Bay. It was just after 5pm on a beautiful October afternoon, and the nation’s eyes were glued on television coverage from Candlestick Park in southeastern San Francisco. Hordes of Bay Area residents had swarmed bars and gathered at home after early …
April 18, 2011
105th Anniversary of SF’s 1906 quake
5:12 a.m. PDT this morning marked the 105-year anniversary of “the San Francisco earthquake,” the >400 km rupture of the northern San Andreas fault that began just offshore and propagated along the fault in both directions for several minutes, all the while churning and twisting the blossoming city above it. It’s helpful to take a moment and reflect upon the reality of the event. I get the impression that such …
April 9, 2011
El Mayor-Cucapah earthquake anniversary
I have just returned from three weeks of field work at the site of a rather forgotten but significant earthquake that occurred one year ago last Monday, just south of the Mexico-U.S. border in Baja California del norte. At 3:40pm PDT last Easter Sunday (April 4, 2010), the ground beneath the Sierra El Mayor began to unzip. The seismic energy that was radiated outward continued rupturing roughly northwest-southeast oriented faults, …