Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant: The WikiBook/San Andreas Fault
According to public domain material from the US Geological Survey, posted at a website[1] in the dot-gov domain, the San Andreas fault includes "several branching faults...[which] share the movement of the crustal plates ... [t]he fault zone is marked by distinctive landforms that include long straight escarpments, narrow ridges, and small undrained ponds formed by the settling of small blocks within the zone. Many stream channels characteristically jog sharply to the right where they cross the fault...[b]locks on opposite sides of the San Andreas fault move horizontally. If a person stood on one side of the fault and looked across it, the block on the opposite side would appear to have moved to the right. Geologists refer to this type fault displacement as right-lateral strike-slip." Source: Sandra S. Schulz and Robert E. Wallace
Accumulated Displacement
[edit | edit source]It is believed that "[d]isplacement from earthquakes and creep is at least 350 miles along the San Andreas fault since it came into being about 15-20 million years ago. Studies of a segment of the fault between Tejon Pass and the Salton Sea revealed geologically similar terranes on opposite sides of the fault now separated by 150 miles, and some crustal blocks may have moved through more than 20 degrees of latitude... drift at the rate of as much as 2 inches per year."
