Word: baying
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...Andreas Fault zone. The same cannot be said about the nearby Hayward Fault. Along with the Calaveras, San Gregorio and Rogers Creek faults, the Hayward forms part of what scientists refer to as the San Andreas system, and it runs for 60 miles along the hills of the East Bay, cutting through the University of California, Berkeley, football stadium and skimming uncomfortably close to the Caldecott Tunnel, through which 153,000 cars pass daily. Major highways, including Interstate 80, cross the Hayward Fault, as do the pipelines that bring water down from the snow-clad Sierra. There are hundreds...
...waves keep bouncing up and down and from side to side." The basin effect amplifies not only the intensity of the shaking but also its duration, which is no doubt why buildings collapsed in Santa Rosa in 1906, killing some 100 people. There are similar sedimentary basins throughout the Bay Area--around the Silicon Valley city of Cupertino, for example, and the expanding subdivisions that surround the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory...
...biggest basin lies well east of the Bay, in the broad delta formed by the convergence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. Among the most catastrophic consequences of a big earthquake in the Bay Area, says University of California at Davis geologist Jeffrey Mount, would be the failure of the delta's aging levee system, which protects not just farmland and residential areas but also the water supply for some 23 million people. Shaken hard enough, the foundations of the levees would crumple, and in a kind of hydrological chain reaction, brackish water from the Bay would surge inland...
...poorly understood currents that roil through a sea of semimolten rock. By keeping tabs on the position of key landmarks on either side of the fault, scientists can measure the speed at which the plates are traveling, in this case about 2 in. a year. The problem for the Bay Area boils down to this: except for one short section, the plates on either side of the San Andreas are tightly locked together. It's only when the stress becomes overwhelming that the San Andreas breaks apart, allowing the plates to lurch forward...
...principle, this cycle of stress accumulation and release should be fairly regular, but scientists are finding it is not. Paleoseismologist Tina Niemi of the University of Missouri--Kansas City, for example, is studying a stream-fed marsh near Tomales Bay that has preserved evidence of past earthquakes in its sedimentary layers. By trenching through those layers to a depth of 15 ft., she has uncovered buried fissures formed by recurrent earth movements along the San Andreas. On average, that pattern repeats every 250 or so years, but "average" in this case covers a wide range. In one instance there appears...