A century ago today, the ground shook beneath California’s San Francisco
in a massive earthquake that devastated the West Coast city
A century
ago today, the ground shook beneath California’s San Francisco in a massive
earthquake that devastated the West Coast city.
At 5:12
a.m. on April 18, 1906, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake killed at least 3,000 people
and spawned fires that decimated much of San Francisco. The temblor originated
along the San Andreas Fault, a long boundary between the Earth’s shifting
Pacific Plate (to the left) as it moved northwest, grinding against the North
American Plate to the right.
The quake
split the ground open for 296 miles (477 kilometers) along the northern regions
of the San Andreas Fault, the earth slipping more than 20 feet (six meters) from
each other at places.
This image
of California’s fault lines uses data from NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography
Mission to identify low elevation in green, with higher regions identified in
yellow, pink and white – the highest. Major fault lines appear as white lines,
with the San Andreas Fault running from northwest to southwest along the state’s
coast. The numbers along that fault line indicate the distance the ground
slipped in feet during the 1906 temblor.
Also in
this image is the Hayward Fault along the eastern edge of the San Francisco
Bay, a likely spot for a future major earthquake.
-- SPACE.com Staff
Credit: NASA/J. Allen/Earth Observatory/SRTM/University
of Maryland’s Global Land
Cover Facility/USGS.
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