A few days I blogged about the four minor earthquakes we experienced here in Northern California over a seven-day span. These temblors were mild, registering between a magnitude 3.0-4.0 on the Richter scale, which is not particularly earth-shattering (pun-intended). For most of us in the Bay Area, the impact of a 3.5 quake is that you hear a short low rumbling sound, or maybe your kitchen window rattles for a second. Truthfully, I am often blissfully unaware of quakes of this magnitude, until I hear about them on the local evening news or read about them online. Still, four tremors in a week is enough to make a fellow curious.
I did some reading to find out what significance geologists ascribe to this rapid series of mini-quakes, and from what I can tell, the scientific conclusions are akin to, "who the hell really knows." They could be foreshocks, minor tremors that precede seriously bad evening news broadcasts ("it was a rough commute on Highway 101 this afternoon as the entire road liquified and fell into a gaping hole in the earth"), but more likely, it's just routine shifting of tectonic plates - the geologic equivalent of the earth having a yawn and a scratch.
I can accept a little ambiguity. We are talking about the earth's crust, after all, which was formed by complex geologic pressures and events that took place over billions of years (or nearly 5,000 evangelical years). If we need a few thousand more generations of scientists to really nail this down, then so be it.
My earthquake research led me to discover more about the San Andreas Fault, the 800 mile long crack in the earth's surface that runs through California, and the place where two of the earth's giant tectonic plates meet, and then proceed to occasionally tussle a bit. When these two plates rub elbows, there is enormous friction and an energy release in the vicinity of the fault line, which sometimes causes your hummels and tchotchkes to shimmy a little, and other times causes tall buildings and double-decker bridges to collapse.
The San Andreas Fault serves as a perforated line that runs north-south through California, wherein the state can conveniently be torn in two with the western half then free to drift out into the Pacific Ocean. Most of us who ever lived outside of California have made that joke, but most of us didn't subsequently end up moving ironically into the heart of the land of tectonic wonders.
