Stop the Plate, I Want to Get Off!

As a resident of Southern California with a home on the Pacific tectonic plate, my area is slowly on its way to becoming a suburb of San Francisco. Some scientists think that movement could pick up very suddenly as my plate tries to move along the North American plate (which is also known as "flyover country"):

The southern end of the San Andreas fault near Los Angeles, which has been still for more than two centuries, is under immense stress and could produce a massive earthquake at any moment, a scientist said on Wednesday.

Yuri Fialko, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at La Jolla, California, said that given average annual movement rates in other areas of the fault, there could be enough pent-up energy in the southern end to trigger a cataclysmic jolt of up to 10 meters (32 ft).

"The observed strain rates confirm that the southern section of the San Andreas fault may be approaching the end of the interseismic phase of the earthquake cycle," he wrote in the science journal Nature.

A sudden lateral movement of 7 to 10 meters would be among the largest ever recorded.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the earthquake that destroyed San Francisco in 1906 was produced by a sudden movement of the northern end of the fault of up to 21 ft.

Fialko said there had been no recorded movement at the southern end of the fault -- the 800-mile long geological meeting point of the Pacific and the North American tectonic plates -- since the dawn of European settlement in the area.

He said this lack of movement for 250 years correlated with the predicted gaps between major earthquakes at the southern end of the fault of between 200 and 300 years.

The "Big One" has been feared for many years, and I can't image a more cataclysmic natural disaster should we get an 8+ on the Richter scale in Southern California. Unlike popular myth, we won't disappear under the sea but will head north. Either way, the resulting damage will be just about as great.

Maybe it's time to consider that new home in the midwest...