Looking Inside the San Andreas

This is another advance in thecollecting of earthquake related data and will be interesting.  Sooner or later we will have three dimensionalseismic the entire length of the fault and perhaps some form of continuousupdating.  All this will put us a lotcloser to having enough data to plausibly monitor quakes when they happen andthat will make it possible to start putting predictive ideas in place.

High quality three D seismic hasbecome standard in the oil industry over the past decade or so and 4000 sensorswill do nicely.

Anyway, it is all good stuff.

Looking inside the San Andreas

Scientists believe a new study of the San Andreas fault within the Salton Trough could change assumptions about theeventual Big One.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-geology-earthquake-20110323,0,3750662,full.story

Geologist Angel Olguin jams a seismic sensor in a shallow troughscraped in the desert floor near the Salton Sea.This and thousands of other sensors will record seismic waves from detonatedexplosives to "map" the San Andreas faultand other features of the Earth's crust below. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

By Thomas Curwen, Los AngelesTimes

March 23, 2011

Reporting from the Salton Sea -- Three days after the earthquakeand tsunami devastated northeastern Japan,Gary Fuis walked across the San Andreas faultunder a moonlit sky. The desert was quiet. A breeze fanned through thecreosote. To the west, he could see the Salton Sea,and to the east, the headlamps of the night crew taking up their positions.

In a little more than an hour, they would start detonating their explosives,generating seismic waves that would be recorded by seismometers buriedthroughout these sandy hills and positioned on the floor of the Salton Sea.

A geophysicist with the United States Geological Survey, Fuis is overseeing anambitious project to create an underground image of one of the most seismicallyactive and geologically complex regions of the country, a triangle of landextending from Palm Springs to the Mexico border.

This work, he believes, will change current assumptions about the earthquakesthat originate here, especially the Big One expected on the San Andreas fault. For nearly three weeks his teams haveworked night and day to cover hundreds of miles and positionthousands of instruments.

Fuis, 67, sat on the top of a ridge and took out his dinner, a ham and jalapenosandwich. From here, he would be able to stay in touch with the crew by two-wayradio and cellphone in case any problems or confusion arose during thenight.

A voice broke over the radio.

"Train south."

A freight speeding along the shore of the lake would interfere with thereadings from the detonations, and they'd have to wait until it passed.

Fuis looked south toward Bombay Beach, a community of small homes anddouble-wide trailers on the edge of the Salton Sea, where the San Andreas fault begins its jagged 800-mile course toward theMendocino coast.

Three years ago, seismologists imagined the effect of a magnitude 7.8earthquake with an epicenter less than a mile from where he sat. Their scenariohad the full force of the temblor reaching the L.A. Basin inless than two minutes. The shaking would extend as far north as Ventura.

The released energy would be approximately 30 times less than the Japaneseearthquake. Still, landslides, fires, collapsed buildings and roadways,severed communication lines, cracked runways, derailed trains, broken aqueductsand dams were projected, along with nearly 2,000 deaths, 50,000 injuries and$200 billion in damage.

The model was based on the last rupture of the San Andreas in this region,dated more than 300 years ago by recent geological studies. Because thisstretch of the fault — from Bombay Beach to the Cajon Pass— has not moved since then, it is considered especially vulnerable to a majorearthquake.

Fuis describes the fault with dispassionate conviction. It is "nearfailure," he says, though he believes the seismologists' predictions maynot be accurate. Whether the destruction will be worse or not, he's notcertain. He just knows that some conclusions have been drawn without enoughinformation.

"Neither the shape of the San Andreas faultnor the sedimentary basins that the cities have been built upon are well enoughunderstood to provide accurate calculations of the shaking," he said.

The chatter on his radio picked up.

He checked the time — 21:59:07 — less than a minute before the first blast.

Earlier that morning, just as the sun was rising, the day crew gathered at awarehouse in El Centro.

John Hole paced with clipboard and pen in hand. Hole, 48, is an associateprofessor of geophysics at Virginia Tech and is managing the study alongwith Fuis and Joann Stock, 51, professor of geology and geophysics at Caltech.

The Salton Seismic Imaging Project is funded with a $1.2-million grant from theNational Science Foundation. Additional money comes from the U.S. GeologicalSurvey. The first findings of the study will be released in September.

Similar research in the 1990s looked at the Los Angeles Basin and theSan Andreas north of the Cajon Pass. The results showeda number of faults lying deep beneath Los Angeles that are capable of producingdangerous earthquakes like the one that caused the Northridge earthquake in1994.

By detonating explosives and measuring the speed of the seismic waves as theymove horizontally and vertically underground, seismologists can assemble imagesof the crust of the Earth, capturing structures like fault lines.

The project was three years in the planning, and the field work got underwaylate February. During public hearings, Fuis had fielded concerns from residentsand local officials who worried that the explosions might set off earthquakes.Rock quarries, he told them, conduct similar blasts without any consequence.

Then less than 24 hours after the earthquake in Japan, the fears arose again.Residents worried about earthquakes, damaged buildings and tainted groundwater. An aide to Rep. Mary Bono Mack, whose district includes theCoachella and Imperial valleys, called the U.S. Geological Survey forreassurance.

Now with only six days left, Hole wanted to make sure everyone stayed focused.So far, they had put out more than 4,000 seismometers, and the night crew hadset off more than 100 explosions.

"This is huge," he reminded them, "the largest project of itskind."

On the wall behind him was a map of Southern California,showing the precisely delineated routes that crews followed, traversingwilderness areas, military installations, Indian reservations, private propertyand cities. Scripps Institute of Oceanography set up its own equipment in the Salton Sea.

Penetrated by volcanoes and cut by the San Andreas and Imperial faults, theregion is part of the Salton Trough, one of the few rift valleys in the worldnot covered by an ocean, a place where geologists can see the continentcoming apart and a new crust of the Earth being formed.

These processes are the result of the Pacific and North American plates slidingagainst each other for nearly 6 million years, an action that triggers theearthquakes in the region.


Toting 40-pound packs in 80-degree heat, the day crew covered a five-mileroute. About every 50 yards, they stopped at mapped locations, dug a trench abouta foot deep and buried a seismometer and geophone.

By mid-afternoon, the night crew parked their SUVs, pick-ups and an enclosed truckbetween the Union Pacific tracks and California Highway111, just north of the Imperial County line. The 16 blastsites had already been dug; Fuis and the crew needed to wire thedetonators to the explosives and lower the explosives into the blast holes, inmost cases 15 feet deep.

Fuis stuffed three boxes of detonators and a bottle of water into his day packand headed out. He began working for the U.S. Geological Survey in themid-1960s. As a student, he had been interested in planetary science but realizedthat he would never touch the rocks he was studying. Peering into the Earthintrigued him more.

"What got a lot of us into the earthquake business," he says,"was the hope we could predict earthquakes — and we still have this hope.In the meantime we have had to start working on something that's practical tothe public, namely how to predict earthquake effects."

Standing roadside, Fuis talked easily about "planar distributions ofhypocenters," "sedimentary velocities," P waves and S waves.When he described the San Andreas fault andthe motion of the two tectonic plates, his hands took flight.

"The San Andreas fault actually appears to be propeller shaped," hesaid, drawing a pirouette in the air and describing how the fault tilts to thenortheast in this basin, then tilts in the opposite direction father north,past the Mojave Desert.

Many seismologists, he explained, assume the fault in this region is largelyvertical, a configuration that places the Pacific plate squarely up against theNorth American plate. Fuis and a few colleagues, however, believe that thePacific plate here is wedged beneath the North American plate.

The implications for Southern California andespecially the Coachella and Imperial valleys are significant, whetherassessing building standards or establishing emergency preparedness procedures.Past modeling of earthquakes in the region has used a vertical fault in mostplaces, but angled faults focus energy differently, with the overriding plate sustainingmost of the damage.

But a greater threat, according to Fuis, is the sedimentary structure of theSalton Trough itself. Excavate this basin of the rocks and soil swept down overthe millenniums from the Rocky Mountains and you'd have a canyon larger thanthe Grand Canyon.

This formation — sediment nearly nine miles deep — can trap earthquake energyand amplify the seismic waves, resulting in longer and more intense shaking. Noone has measured the wave speeds throughout the basin until now.

By midnight, Fuis was chilled. Orion angled behind the Santa Rosa Mountains,and a cool breeze came in from the east.

For the last hour he had been following the progress of his explosives handlersas they moved from one blast site to the next. Each team had to follow arigorous schedule that kept them from firing at the same time and distortingthe readings.

Coyn Criley and Joe Svitek were running late for their 1 a.m. detonation. Theirfirst blast had taken longer than expected, and Svitek spooled out 200 feet ofwire to the clearing where the explosives were buried. He and Criley spliced itto the detonators, connecting the circuit.

With two minutes remaining, they retreated to the shooting box, a small yellowbriefcase that contained a clock and the battery that would initiate the explosion.At 25 seconds, Criley pushed the charge button. An orange light startedflashing. At 15 seconds, he pushed the arm button.

"Five, four, three, two, one."

Whoomp.

A sharp jolt and a fast undulation raced through the sandy soil.

Fuis heard the blast from the ridge. By then the seismic waves, racing at threemiles a second, had already passed beneath him and were dissipating in thedistance. The geophones had captured the ground motion; the seismometersrecorded the impulse; and soon the information would join the rest of the data,one piece in the larger puzzle.

One day, Fuis knew, another sort of wave would start from this place, and itwouldn't fade so quickly.