Northern San Andreas

The Golden Gate Bridge crosses the Bay inlet in the lower right of this image, and the San Andreas fault runs under the sea left of the bridge and comes ashore in the broad valley, upper left.  Point Reyes (far left) is famous for its great white sharks and fog.  Bodega Bay lies in the distance.

Bodega Bay, where "The Birds" was filmed.  Pacific Gas & Electric was excavating for a nuclear power plant on the point of land marking the north end of the bay inlet.  Dr. Richard "Dick" Jahns, Dean of Stanford's School of Earth Sciences, was quite amused by the magnitude of ignorance demonstrated by PG&E executives (this is near the 1906 epicenter!).  The story gets better - this nuclear plant was relocated to the south, a coastal site name Diablo Canyon, far from the San Andreas but near an offshore fault perfectly capable of magnitude 7+ earthquakes, a fault shown on oil exploration cross sections but which PG&E did not appear interested in learning about until the plant was nearly completed.  Time delays and retrofitting the nuclear plant cost PG&E more than the entire funding of earthquake research in the USA over that same time frame.

Vertical view of north coast of California, where the San Andreas runs onshore, then offshore, then back on before ending at the Mendocino fracture zone.
 

Low-angle view toward northwest shows fault up close but obvious signs of the San Andreas are lost in the hills in the distance.

Looking southeast, the San Andreas enters the image from Bodega Bay as a broad valley, which becomes lost in the hills as another, narrower linear feature to the lower right appears to take over as the fault trace.  This kind of left-offset of a right-lateral strike-slip fault makes for pressure ridges, whereas a right-offset in the trace of a right-lateral fault makes for sag ponds.

End of tour.  Return to Index.