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August 30, 2014
Earthquake rupture through a U.S. suburb
In the quiet wee hours of a NorCal summer night, the ground lurched beneath the mud of the northern San Francisco Bay and sent seismic waves roaring upward and outward into the world-famous wine valley’s central city, Napa, CA. After they wreaked their havoc in Napa and nearby communities the seismic waves spread farther afield and gently rumbled most of the Bay Area and its exurbs from our weekend slumber. By the time …
January 11, 2014
New map of Hollywood fault released
Amid an atmosphere of contention and high stakes, the California Geological Survey this week released a preliminary official map of the Hollywood Fault, one of the most threatening urban earthquake faults in the U.S. The map ( available in PDF format here ) delineates the best estimate surface trace of the Hollywood fault, which forms the southern boundary of the Santa Monica Mountains in urban Los Angeles. It also defines a “special …
January 9, 2013
Join my SSA special session: When and Why do Earthquake Ruptures Stop?
The clock is ticking on abstract submission for the April 17-19 annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America. Julian Lozos (of Seismogenic, and of course of the PhD program at UC Riverside) and I are convening one of the special sessions, entitled “When and Why Do Earthquake Ruptures Stop? Evaluating Competing Mechanisms of Rupture Termination.” I highly encourage any of you who think you have answers to that question …
November 5, 2012
Ten years ago Denali shook
Saturday [November 3, 2012] marked the ten-year anniversary of the largest quake to hit the U.S. since 1964, and the 1906 SF quake before that. The M7.9 Denali earthquake tore a ~250 mile gash through Alaskan glaciers and pine forests along the Denali Fault, which runs beside the eponymous mountain also known as Mt. McKinley, North America’s highest peak. Much like the Haida Gwaii earthquake last week, the Denali quake …
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, …
