Word: crusts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...down steep hillsides. Slowly she pivots, taking in the sailboats on the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, the shimmering surface of the Pacific Ocean. Just out there--she points--a couple of miles offshore, lies the place where, early in the morning of April 18, 1906, the earth's crust cracked like an eggshell, unleashing what--even in the aftermath of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina--stands as one of the greatest disasters in U.S. history...
...Lawson and his team went on to elaborate a new model of earthquake formation--the elastic-rebound theory--that holds up to this day. For years, they correctly surmised, stress had been ratcheting up along the San Andreas until finally it became so overwhelming that the earth's crust snapped like an overextended rubber band. Moreover, the buildup and release of strain appeared to be recurrent, resulting over time in a succession of earthquakes "of greater or less violence." These pioneering researchers provided the first big clue that earthquakes occur in cycles--that in the area around San Francisco...
Earthquakes, scientists now know, occur along the San Andreas because the immense slabs of rock that make up the earth's crust are ever so slowly sliding past one another, borne by 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...
What will happen when the Hayward Fault--or the San Andreas--goes off? Scientists who study ancient quakes cannot answer that question because it depends on details that sediments do not preserve. But using a new 3-D model of the earth's crust in the Bay Area, USGS geophysicist Brad Aagaard and his colleagues can run simulations that tweak different parameters for earthquakes that have already occurred and for those still to come. The results range from the expected to the quite surprising...
...Mariam and Maria, aged 13 and 14, on the night of his arrest appear to detail his failures as a parent. "He behaves badly with us and we were threatened and disgraced by him. He has no job and has never given me a stitch of clothing or a crust of bread. Just his name as a father," said his 13-year-old daughter Mariam in a statement signed with her inky fingerprint...