Word: franciscos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Statue of Liberty was dedicated in New York harbor to the ideal of taking in the tired, the poor and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, racist mobs rioted in Seattle and forced more than half the city's 350 Chinese onto a ship bound for San Francisco. That two chambers of Congress, both run by the same political party, should appear to be headed in such different directions on immigration tells you that the country is no less conflicted about the issue today. But the fact that for the first time in 20 years, lawmakers are even considering...
From the local vista point known as Twin Peaks, Mary Lou Zoback, a senior scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), looks out on a breathtaking view of San Francisco--the gilded dome of City Hall, the diagonal stripe of Market Street, the little neighborhoods marching up and 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...
Today, 100 years later, the damage that resulted from the great quake seems nearly as shocking as it did then: some 28,000 buildings destroyed, more than 3,000 people killed, at least 225,000 more--roughly half the population of the city of San Francisco at the time--left homeless. But, more shocking still, was the fact that no one, not even scientists, could explain why, without warning, such fury had erupted from the earth below...
...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 Bay, earthquakes are as certain, if not as regular, as the seasons...
From the air, the San Andreas stands out as a linear gash in the earth's surface that is easy to spot. On the ground, however, it is often hard to read, particularly north and south of San Francisco where it strays offshore, runs through dense redwood forests and even disappears beneath houses and streets. In many populated areas, it's impossible to tell just where the active strands of the fault lie because so many features have been filled in or bulldozed away...