Word: faults
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...most recent mishap was experienced in 2002 when America Online’s filter system interpreted Harvard’s e-mails as spam and bounced the messages back to the admissions office. Fortunately for the College, it was obvious then that the Harvard admissions office was not at fault. Other than a few extra telephone calls, the error caused little distress. Other schools have committed more serious e-mail errors, in some cases sending mistaken letters of acceptance to students whom they had no intention of letting in. Most of the schools have simply admitted to their mistakes, apologized...
...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 of the San Andreas are tightly locked together. It's only...
Already, scientists say, there is a greater than 60% probability that one or more of the faults in the San Andreas system will unleash an earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or higher over the next three decades, and among the most likely candidates is the Hayward Fault. The last big earthquake on the Hayward occurred in 1868; it caused so much damage that it was known as the great San Francisco earthquake until 1906 displaced it. "The Hayward Fault is locked and loaded," says Brocher, "and it could fire at any time...
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...
Aagaard and his colleagues have started using their earthquake simulator to try to answer the most tantalizing questions of all: What if the rupture of the fault had not started directly off the San Francisco coastline? What if it had started farther south, so that instead of breaking away from the city it had aimed right toward it? What if it had started farther north and broken south? In the first instance, the tentative answer is that San Francisco gets shaken even harder; in the second, it's Silicon Valley and the Livermore Valley that find themselves clamped...