Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Even as the earth rocked and rolled, California's army of seismologists rallied into action. In Berkeley, University of California graduate student Anthony Lomax felt the sidewalk shiver and watched telephone poles sway, then rushed to his seismographic station. "The instruments were off-scale!" he marveled. Within minutes the scientists on duty had pinpointed the epicenter of the quake in the rugged Santa Cruz mountains some 50 miles away. The spot was no surprise: it lay on the San Andreas fault, a great gash in the earth that extends nearly the length of the California coast. Even before the quake...
...earth is constantly moving underfoot. Its surface, cracked like ancient pottery, is broken into 15 large pieces. These pieces of crust, called plates, restlessly roam about, driven by plumes of molten rock that roil up from the planet's superheated core. Many of the world's largest earthquakes occur at the boundaries of such plates. The San Andreas fault system divides the Pacific plate and the North American plate, which grind past each other at the pace of 2 in. a year. But this movement of the plates is not uniform. Along fault zones the plates tend to become "locked...
...Angeles, near the tiny town of Parkfield, scientists are conducting an experiment that they hope will open the door to a new era of earthquake prediction. Along a 20-mile section of the San Andreas, researchers have sunk strain gauges up to 1,000 ft. deep into the earth and laced the surface with "creep meters" that measure rock movement. "We're listening to the heartbeat of this section of the fault very, very closely," says the Geological Survey's Thatcher. The Parkfield section of the San Andreas is unusual in that it is the Old Faithful of earthquake zones...
ESSAY: When the earth cracks open and talks...
...would be delightful to think that he actually uttered those words, looking for sermons in the shaking stones. In any case, Muir was alone in the moonlit mountains, and so he could indulge his charming 19th century awe. When the earth turned in its sleep, it crushed much landscape in the folds, but somehow the event could keep its innocence. When nature does something awful, after all, is it part of the electrical display of God the Father, or merely geography rearranging itself, obeying an impersonal agenda...