The Moving Landscape

 

The San Andreas fault runs across Little Cholame Creek in Parkfield, Calif., meaning the west side of the bridge is on the Pacific plate, and the east side on the North American plate. This image was taken about four weeks before a Sept. 28, 2004 quake. The two nearest piers moved a couple centimeters in opposite directions, and will certainly move more.

The hamlet of Parkfield in central California (Monterey County) is right on the San Andreas fault. The Parkfield motto is, “Eat here when it happens, sleep here when it happens,” i.e., the ?EUR??,,????'??Big One.?EUR??,,????'??

This rig in Parkfield, the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD) project, has drilled to the San Andreas fault and uses seismic instruments to monitor subterranean activity. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation

>More curiously, the San Andreas fault here runs across Little Cholame Creek. What that means, tectonically speaking, is the eastern bridge abutment is on the great North American Plate, while the western abutment is on the Pacific plate. The Pacific plate impacts such far away land masses as Hawaii and the South Island of New Zealand, according to Simon Winchester in A Crack in the Edge of the World. Not surprisingly, the bridge has been destroyed twice. The new bridge, however, is ready for earth shaking. It is built to slide on concrete bolsters.