Earthquake technology

A hundred years ago, the earth shook under San Francisco, destroying the city and stimulating
the emergence of modern seismology. But the earthquakes continue to surprise us even
nowadays.

"I would like to predict this earthquake," he said. Sieh showed me on the map the region he
thinks will follow the line. He and his colleagues will spend the following years in that place,
listening to the raft, watching the movements of the Earth and measuring the unstable soil. He
had also heard the chorus that the earthquakes were chaotic and unpredictable. But that's not
what he was seeing on the tectonic map. He saw a fissure that gradually fractured from north to
south. "Obviously, this is not chaos. It's something linear. " In his office at Caltech, Sieh showed
me a tectonic map of the plate, on which were presented the GPS stations placed along the plate
of the Sumatra area before the earthquake in March. Everything had moved, shrouded up and
down. One, just above the fracture produced in March, jumped three meters up and four meters
southwest. The pattern of these movements shows that tensions are still gathering. "If there is
another strong earthquake in the next year," he said, "I suppose there will be a few hundred
thousand people dead." Three months later, on March 28, 2005, that segment was fractured in
an earthquake of magnitude 8.7 degrees - smaller than the first but still ranked among the top
ten earthquakes ever recorded. There was another tsunami, but this time collapsed buildings
and falling objects affected the most of the victims: over 1,000. At the end of the Christmas
day, when he received the news of the devastating tsunami by e-mail, Sieh was afraid of his
friends in Sumatra and had a bleak premonition: there would still be a strong earthquake.
Releasing the tension in a portion of the collapse, this earthquake amplified the tension in the
next segment which lain in south. Sieh and his team had shared posters in several villages in
southern Sumatra, warning that catastrophic tsunamis could occur. But Sieh's colleague,
Catharine Stebbins, found that the posters and the American scientific expedition seemed to
shadow the message itself. "It was like the circus came into the town." And nobody thought
that the northern part of the fallacy would yield/fall first.

It also happened other times, towards the end of the 1300s, around 1600, in 1797 and 1833 -
dates that Sieh had established by studying the ancient coral formed along the islands, off the
western coast of Sumatra. When the earth was shaken during strong earthquakes, the coral
formations were pushed out of the water, leaving a void in their growth strata. But the last really
powerful earthquake had happened long before the current inhabitants of Sumatra. The Sumatra
earthquake was not a total geological surprise. Two weeks ago, Sieh lectured on his research
on the great submarine fault parallel to the Sumatra coast, where a tectonic plate slides beneath
another. He had warned that the fault section he was studying far south of the portion that had
actually broken could break at any time, causing tsunamis. Soon the replies came - a few dozen
in the next few hours. Gradually, the data began to coagulate around an obvious fact: it was a
very large earthquake, exceeding the magnitude of 9 degrees. According to the news a tsunami
had killed a few thousand people in Sri Lanka. Then these figures started to grow.

In 2004, at 18:16 on Christmas Day, Sieh was at home in front of the computer when he received
by e-mail a bulletin about a seismic event produced at 3.3 degrees north latitude and 95.8
degrees east longitude, near Sumatra. For Sieh, seismic bulletins are a matter of routine -
earthquakes occur every day all over the world. But a certain figure catched his eye. That was
the magnitude originally estimated for the earthquake that had occurred one and a half hour
behind. An earthquake of 8.5 degrees is something enormous. Kerry Sieh believes science can
break the cycle of these calamities. Sieh, an expert in seismic geology at Caltech, is sure that

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there is a way to read the messages from the rocks to take account of the warnings encoded in
their tremors. He knows from his own experience how much he can win if we can identify the
most dangerous faults and find out when they are ready to break.

"The fifth sun is the last," Lomnitz told me. And it will end with an earthquake. " Catastrophes
have been part of the cultural design of the city for centuries. Underneath a church in the center,
Cinna Lomnitz, a seismologist at the University of Mexico, led me down a hidden stairway to
the remains of an Aztec pyramid that sinks slowly on the soft bottom of the lake. An ancient
bas-relief in stone depicts four suns around a central sun. According to Aztec legends, each sun
represents a period of earthly existence, and each is eventually destroyed. Mexico City is
another waiting catastrophe. Much of the city is built on a soft, sludge land, the remains of a
sparkling Spanish lake. In 1985, more than 9,500 people died when a subduction zone off the
western coast of Mexico broke, sending seismic sites that spread hundreds of kilometers to the
capital. The standards of construction have improved since then but they’re available only to
new buildings. And the population grew significantly. Almost 20 million people live now in a
metropolis surrounded by active volcanoes, which, like the Himalayas, are proof of the tectonic
forces that can make cities to raze to the ground. And the population grew astronomically.
Almost 20 million people now live in a metropolis surrounded by active volcanoes, which, like
the Himalayas, are proof of the tectonic forces that can take down big cities.

In Kathmandu, a city full of such tall structures made of brick, an official told Tucker once:
"We no longer have earthquakes." The city is surrounded by the Himalayan peaks, on which
the tectonic forces push toward the stratosphere. Tucker told the official: "Look out the window.
Everest’s there. As long as you see it, you will still have earthquakes. "Geophysicist Brian
Tucker, the head of a nonprofit organization called GeoHazards International, travelled around
the Globe lobbying local authorities to build more resistant/stronger homes, schools and
highways. He saw cities where poor citizens extend their dwellings/houses vertically, building
one brick floor over another and seemingly waiting for gravity to pull them all down. Last
October, an earthquake measuring 7.6 degrees magnitude shook the northern part of Pakistan
and Kashmir, the mountainous area claimed by both Pakistan and India. Within a few minutes,
tens of thousands of people died. Many others died later because of wounds and exposure to
cold. Many of them died crushed in their concrete blocks, with little or no steel pillars that
collapsed suddenly. If this earthquake had occurred in the neighboring city, Rawalpindi, with a
population of 1.8 million, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been lost. Many people
are still dying when earth starts to shake. I am still amazed by many people when the ground
beneath them starts earthquakes. Almost always, the cause of their death is not the earthquake
itself, but the houses, offices, shops or schools that collapse over them. An earthquake that
would result in tens or hundreds of casualties in California or Japan could make tens of
thousands of casualties in Latin America or Central and South Asia, where many buildings are
just piles of unbound masonry/brickwork. There is a seismic gap between the poor and the rich.
"They are gone. They went to heaven. You can see the paintings there. "Indeed, there were
paintings that showed how the mighty waves led people to heaven. "My grandmother rose to
the sky and disappeared." Near Tokyo’s sumo stadium there is Tokyo City Memorial Museum,
commemorating the disasters that hit the city. A small and energetic gentleman, named Nobuo
Yanai, aged 82, comes here every year to pay tribute to the nine members of the family lost in
the great earthquake produced/occured in Kanto in 1923. They died not in the earthquake but
in the fire that had devoured the field where 40,000 people were temporarily housed - a huge
crowd - who burned alive. After the earthquake in Kobe, Japan made a covenant/vow to be
prepare better for a serious shake. Many of the high-speed trains hit the breaks now at the first
seismic tremor. Construction plans must be supervised more closely, especially in Tokyo,

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which is located on or near several dangerous faults. But the country has been shaken in recent
months by a scandal: while the authorities pretended not to see it, corrupt builders raised dozens
of structures too fragile to withstand earthquakes. Their residents were lucky that the scandal
broke out before another inevitable earthquake follows.

Geller's skepticism is not just a manifestation of the American candor/frankness. Hideki

Shimamura, an earthquake expert from Musashino Gakuin University, near Tokyo, is almost
as straightforward as ever. "Perhaps the pre-glide phenomenon exists, but I doubt it," he said,
adding that few researchers are willing to question Tokai's concern, being afraid of losing
funding. The situation can have fatal consequences - he says: before the Kobe earthquake,
which killed 6,400 people in 1995, few residents or officials in Kobe suspected they were
vulnerable. Earthquakes were mainly the problem of others – far away in the East, close to
Tokai. "They did not get prepared," says Shimamura. Robert Geller, an American geophysicist
working close the Tokyo University School of Sciences, is less circumspect. Geller has been
living in Japan for decades, turning "unlocking seismic predictions," as he calls it, into a
passionate hobby. He calls the prediction program "science based on faith." "It has never been
verified whether the pre-glide occurs in case of a real earthquake," he adds. However, none of
the experts in the Tokai earthquake describe this scenario with too much conviction. If you
pressure them, I admit they have no certainties. Yamaoka and Kato, for example, are both
defensive when it comes to pre-glide, but they admit that it may be too small to be detected.

The government has an action plan, built around the idea of "pre-glide". Devices measuring the
accumulated voltage are inserted into the ground throughout Tokai area. If one or two of these
counters signal anomalies, scientists meet and schools get closed. Three anomalies will put the
country on alert. Police, soldiers and firefighters will flee to the border of the vulnerable region.
Prime Minister will make a speech, announcing that an earthquake is imminent. On the posters
of the plan there is a cartoon of the prime minister who is sitting at the office with crossed arms,
worried but in control of the situation. Naoyuki Kato, another expert at the Seismological
Research Institute, says he has made some experiments about how, before the fracture breaks,
an inevitably low glide occurs.

He believes that what happens in the laboratory on a small scale will also happen with a
hundred-kilometre-long fault that goes down in the Earth’s crust just before the next great
earthquake. Until now the Tokay story is more like a forecast than a prediction. But a precise
prediction of the place and the moment would be more useful for those who conceive the plans
for the crisis. This created the idea of "pre-sliding", a notion that sceptics say is partly science
and part desire. At the Seismological Research Institute, Keiji Doi, who is in charge of
informing the public, presents the complete scenario. The land near Shizuoka sinks towards the
syncline by about five millimetres per year, indicating that tensions build up here. From our
point of view the production of an earthquake is imminent, says Doi.
There is indeed a boundary between the tectonic plates, called Synclinal Nankai, just off the
coast of Honshu Island, where the Philippine plate subducts underneath Japan. This tectonic
boundary has generated severe earthquakes once every 100 or 150 years. Two sections of the
fault, who are close to each other, broke in 1944 and 1946. But the Tokai section has not
produced any major earthquake since 1854. The theory holds that the time has come for this
portion of the subduction zone to release its accumulated tension. Scientist estimated that the
death toll would be between 7,900 and 9,200 for an earthquake that would occur without a
warning early in the morning. Estimated property damage: up to 310 billion dollars. At the
Tokai earthquake training centre in Shizuoka, a map shows the 6,449 locations where landslides

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will occur. Another map shows the 58,402 houses that could burn in the fires caused by the
earthquake. Everything is documented remarkably. Only the earthquake has to occur.
In fact, Japan has already named its next great earthquake: the Tokai earthquake. The
government has identified and defined the exact region that will be affected - a region located
along the Pacific coast, about 150 kilometres southwest of Tokyo. After several small
earthquakes occurred in the Tokai area in the 1970s, scientists have predicted that a powerful
earthquake would be imminent. The Japanese government issued a law in 1978, giving green
light to preparations for the Tokai earthquake. In Japan, government scientists say they have
clarified this issue. Earthquakes do not happen randomly. They follow a certain pattern. They
are preceded by certain signs. The government knows where a major earthquake is most likely
to happen in Japan. This is the country where trains arrive on time, and the earthquakes should
behave in a similar way/ the same. "We believe it is possible to predict the earthquakes," says
Koshun Yamaoka, a scientist at the Institute of Seismological Research at Tokyo University.
"In a way, we test the possibility of predicting earthquakes," says Mark Zoback of Stanford
University, a member of the drilling team. On the controversy between "chaotic" and "linear"
he says "we are the ones who are trying to find out which one is right. I do not want to be
hypocritical, but I think many of these points of view are supported by people's beliefs rather
than data. " Only a man who would descend to the depths of the fault, could do more than the
hole/ well, but even the hole/ well cannot carry the instruments at a depth of 10 km, where many
of the powerful earthquakes start/ begin. But science goes on - and digs deeper.
Parkfield is still full of seismometers and GPS stations, and now there is even a 55-meter high
oil rig/ drilling rig. At the end of the summer, in 2005, the probe had pierced the fault and
reached the maximum possible depth of three kilometres. More disappointing for scientists was
the lack of omens. They carefully studied all the data and failed to find any evidence that
something unusual would have occurred on the fault before the fracture from September 28.
Maybe a small change occurred in the crust’s tensions, the day before the earthquake, but even
that wasn’t a certainty. The unsettling idea that there is nothing one can do has spread, these
things are simply unpredictable, random, strange. We missed the Parkfield earthquake for more
than ten years - and this was an earthquake in a glass of water, "said David Jackson, from
UCLA, from the chaos camp.
Scientists have monitored the fault in all possible ways, hoping to detect any sign of
accumulated tension, moving water or any sign that precedes an earthquake. But year after year
the earthquake didn’t occur. It became a cause for embarrassment for all those who claimed
there was a pattern in earthquakes. Finally, an earthquake of magnitude 6 occurred on
September 28, 2004, but its epicentre was located a few miles south of Parkfield. A camera had
been installed to capture the way the fault fractured itself in the North-South direction, but it
broke in the south-north direction. Parkfield takes its right to…. At the Parkfield Cafe there is
an inscription that says: "If you feel a tremor or shudder, hide under the table and finish your
steak." In fact, the earthquakes here are not too strong. They usually have a magnitude of 6. But
there was a whole string of them. After the one in 1996, researchers realized that these
earthquakes happen on a regular basis, approximately once every 22 years and as a
consequence, in the early ‘80s the rumor had it that a new earthquake should have occurred in
Parkfield around year 1988.
“When it comes to faults, one can’t afford to look under the car bonnet to see what’s wrong.” –
writes Susan Hough, seismologist at USGS, in her book Earthshaking science. But some
scientists still want to have a peep. Their idea: to drill into the San Andreas fault, find the longest
drilling probe in California and stick the huge steel tubes into the depths of the fault, bring down

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there some devices to take rock samples and note its alternations. This project is being carried
out near Parkfield, a village located in a dusty valley in the central California.

The nearby faults add a new level of uncertainty. Up high, in the Santa Cruz Mountains, near
Palo Alto, one can stand on the San Andreas fault, not far from the epicenter of the 6,9
magnitude earthquake, which shook Loma Prieta in 1989. That earthquake was violent enough
to destroy highways and bridges and kill tens of people, but it didn’t fracture/crack at all the
Earth’s surface. Even today nobody knows for sure to what extent the San Andreas Fault (or
maybe another one from the unknown ones) is responsible for this earthquake. In the Point
Reyes Peninsula, a strip of land situated north of San Francisco, Tina Niemi is digging in the
search of an answer.
In the peat and compact sediments in a ditch dug across the fault, the geologist from Missouri
University notices a smooth fracture, a line which crosses the wall of the trench from the upper
left to the bottom right/on the diagonal. The line isn’t perfectly straight, but it has an irregular
track. Cumulated with other aspects, these unpredictable deviations suggest that something
shook the ground here 12 times in the last 3000 years. Nobody sees simple patters when it
comes to earthquakes – neither in time, nor as magnitude. “Instead our data support the idea of
a pattern for irregular events” – she says.
Scientist like Prentice would love to find out when exactly a large earthquake occurred on the
San Andreas Fault before 1906. One can sometimes read that the fault fractures every 150 or
200 or 250 years, but these aren’t exact data. They are just well documented assumptions. O
century after Lawson and her team wandered through California, researchers still spot the fault
active traces. I have joined Carol Prentice from US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, who
wandered through these thick sequoia woods in the north of California. She uses a new
technology, called LIDAR, which tracks down the outlines of the land, using photogrammetry
with laser. Equipped with photos and maps, Carol wanders through the woods, noting every
feature that could unveil the exact location of the fault: ponds formed in slumped ground,
streams deviated from their course, displaced fences. She has even found what seems to be a
sequoia stump simply split by the violent earthquake. Prentice proceeds through such a thick
and tangled up bush that I have to crawl. I ask her what would happen if the fault broke right
below us, here, in thickets. “It would be amazing if it happened here – she says. I would love
it. You couldn’t stand on your feet. You would fall. And probably you would see the ground
“being shred and rhythmically waving.”, quote from Lawson report.
Although it is probably the most famous fault on the planet, San Andreas is often, mysteriously,
hard to be found. It has been forming itself an enigmatic track, through an extremely diverse
topography. Sometimes it is evident – seen from above the Carrizo Plain, in the south of the
central California, where for example it looks like a zipper, or at Thousand Palms, in the Mojave
Desert, where the palm trees orderly line up to sip from the water springing from the fault. But
San Andreas is usually hidden in the landscape, being an obscure presence. You are looking for
the fault’s line and you are thinking: “Is this it? Or this? Is here the border between two
enormous tectonic plates, one of them reaching Japan and the other one the center of the Atlantic
Ocean? Or am I standing in an ordinary ditch?
At some point, the San Andreas Fault will go through another relaxation process (????) When
this happens, almost everybody will be caught off guard, despite all the predictions, measures
and scientific conferences. But, apart from the area called “displacement area” in the central
California, the San Andreas Fault is stuck. The ground around San Francisco hasn’t moved
since 1906. A long segment of the fault in the center of Los Angeles is stuck since 1857. Near

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Palm Springs, the fault hasn’t been active since 1680. Lawson, Reid and their colleagues didn’t
have the necessary means to understand the fundamental source of the forces that generate
earthquakes. But in the late ‘60s, scientists realized that the Earth’s crust is divided into around
15 tectonic plates, which constantly move, while new rock form on the bottom of the ocean and
the old crust sinks towards Earth’s interior, in the subduction zones, located deep down in the
ocean. Suddenly it became crystal clear that Himalaya was the place where India had
crushed Asia.

And San Andreas was not just a recurring long fault, it was the edge of a tectonic plate, the
place where the North American and Pacific plates are slowly moving alongside each other at
a rate, accurately measured by GPS, of five centimeters per year.
In the course of the investigation, a scientist, named Harry Fielding Reid, figured out why
earthquakes occur. Reid studied all the reports of ground motion, of roads and fences offset by
fault and formulated the key concept of "elastic rebound". The surface of the Earth is not
perfectly stiff, it bends. The land at a certain distance from a fault will gradually stretch in the
opposite direction, but the fault itself will remain locked, subject to increasing strain. Finally,
the fault breaks and the land is violently sprung back, releasing the accumulated strain. An
earthquake is "a relaxation process" at least from the standpoint of the planet, says Bill
Ellsworth of the US Geological Survey, in Menlo Park, California.
But earthquakes are moments full of lessons./There are many lessons which can be learned
from earthquakes. When the fires died down and the reconstruction work began in San
Francisco, Lawson and a team of colleagues set out to solve the mystery of the Great
Earthquake. They literally followed the track of the turned up ground, the so-called „mole
track”, left by the fault fracture, passing across yards and meadows. They continued to go south
a thousand kilometers, reading the landscape and discovering the unfractionated sections of the
fault. It kept going, reaching Los Angeles. In 1908, the team published the famous Lawson
report presenting this split into the crust of the Earth in vivid photographic details.
The event caused a kind of war against earthquakes, using the weapons of science. Until the
earthquake in San Francisco, geologists were unsure how faults and earthquakes connected.
Many believed that faults were the side effects of earthquakes, not their source. The great
geologist Andrew Lawson, from Berkeley, had discovered the San Andreas Failure more than
a decade earlier, naming it the San Andreas Valley, maybe even after his own name. But he
considered it a simple crack in the ground, a trivial thing not more than 20 kilometers in length,
responsible for the narrow valley that holds San Andreas Lake and Crystal Springs Reservoir
on the San Francisco Peninsula.
It was not, by far, the most terrible earthquake in history, but it was sensational. Not only did it
heave the ground and break down buildings but also broke the water pipes, leaving the San
Francisco residents completely helpless when their Victorian homes, crowded shopping
districts, warehouses, and opera burned to the ground. No one knows exactly how many people
died, but the estimated figure is 3,000. An earthquake breaks a fault at a speed of three
kilometers per second. It broke both north and south. In some places, the crack was only two
meters, but elsewhere the ground moved/lurched? 5 meters in an instant. The fault broke for
435 kilometers, from Shelter Cove up to the north of California's sequoica forests, and in the
south up to the old missionary city of San Juan Bautista. But that changed the next morning at
5:12, when the bars had been empty at last. Something happened deep under the bottom of the
ocean, just off the Golden Gate Bridge, near the navigation channel. Along an ancient crack in
the Earth, two rock slabs began moving in opposite directions.
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We have been trying this since the Earth humbled the city of San Francisco. In April 1906, this
was the center of the West's commercial and financial power, a crucible of great success, an
absolutely decadent place by reputation, splendid by any definition, with about 400,000 citizens
and probably nearly as many bars. The renowned Enrico Caruso sang at the opera the night of
April 17. Surely there must be a way to impose order and decorum on this slippery land, we say
to ourselves, trying hard to be convincing.
They walk through ghostly forests, in which dead trees tell about tsunamis produced long ago.
They make maps of balanced, precarious rocks to see where the ground has shaken in the past
and how violently. They dig trenches across faults, looking for the active trace. They have wired
up the fault areas with so many sensors so the Earth looks like a patient in the intensive care
salon. Turning forecasts into predictions ("It is estimated that an earthquake of a magnitude of
7 degrees will occur here three days from now") may be impossible, but scientists are doing
everything they can to solve the mysteries of earthquakes. They break rocks in labs, studying
how the rock behaves under pressure. However, for the moment, the prediction of earthquakes
remains a matter of myth and fables in which birds, snakes, fish, and bunnies would somehow
„sniff out” the calamity. What is currently in the hands of scientists is to draw up good maps of
fault areas and find out which ones are likely to fracture and to make forecasts. A forecast might
say that over a number of years there is a certain probability that an earthquake of a certain
magnitude will occur in a certain place. And that you should bolt your house to its foundation
and lash the water heater to the wall.
The "orderly" versus "chaotic" debate is not a simple esoteric bickering between researchers.

The earthquakes kill people. They destroy/blow cities. The Tsunami of December 26, 2004,
triggered by a huge seism, harvested/ blighted over 220,000 lives. The 7.6 magnitude
earthquake from last October which hit Kashmir killed at least 73,000 people. It is
likely/presumable that a million people would be killed or wounded if a strong earthquake
would break up the high, unfunded structures in Tehran, Kabul or Istanbul. One of the world's
largest economies, Japan, rests/leans uneasily on a seismically violent intersection between
several tectonic plates. A strong earthquake produced on one of the hidden fault lines under Los
Angeles could kill ten thousand people. A tsunami could devastate the northwest Pacific coast.
Even New York city could be shaken by an earthquake.
And here is the big question: Are there patterns, specific rules and regularities in producing
earthquakes? Or are these just happening randomly and chaotic? Perhaps - as seismologist
Robert Nadeau from Berkeley says - "the random nature is largely due to the lack of
knowledge." But any seismological map shows that the fault lines do not follow clear, orderly
lines on the surface of the landscape. There are places like Southern California, where these
maps look like a broken windshield. All that cracked, unstable crust is boiling over the
accumulated tension. When a fault line moves, it can transfer pressure on other fault lines. The
seismologist David Jackson of UCLA, a leader of the chaos camp, says that the earthquake
science (domain) is "barely beginning to recognize this level of complexity." To some of the
simplest questions about earthquakes is still very difficult to answer. Why do they start? What
makes them stop? Does the fault line tend to slip, shortly before it catastrophically fractures,
revealing its evil intention? Why are some small earthquakes amplifying, becoming big
earthquakes, while others remain small? It's been a hundred years since the last major
earthquake in California, the one in 1906, in San Francisco, which contributed to the birth of
the modern earthquake science. A century later, we have a very successful theory, called plate
tectonics, which explains why earthquakes such as the one in 1906 occur, but also why the

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continents are moving, why mountains rise and why the volcanoes border the Fire Circle of the
Pacific. The plate tectonics theory could possibly be one of the great triumphs of the human
mind, the answer given by geology to the theory of evolution, formulated by biology. However,
scientists still can not say when an earthquake is about to occur. They can not even estimate it.
Here we have one of the main problems about earthquakes: they refuse to operate at the time
zone of mankind. Earthquakes generating fault lines have a bad habit of combining patience
with impulsivity. They wait for a while, then shudder/ stagger.
But, of course, no one in the field is thinking about the earthquake. It is a hot summer day, a
few weeks before the beginning of the season. Players are busy building their team and
defeating Stanford. Much of the stadium is built on a soft ground that amplifies the seismic
waves. "In the event of an earthquake, the land may become completely unstable." says Allen.
That does not mean that the players would sink like in a trembling aspic/gelatine . They would
simply be knocked to the ground, quieted/coated by the earthquake. Allen teaches the oldest
course about earthquakes from Berkeley. He calls it the Earthquakes in your courtyard. The
name is extremely appropriate, because Hayward is an extremely dangerous fault line. It did
not generate any major earthquake since 1868. It is possible to trigger it soon enough. But Allen
highlights for me the main problem: the fault lines are not just slipping but also breaking. They
"fracture" themselves. Movement occurs in everyone's sight, but the rupture, fracture,
bruising/tossing - the earthquake - hits you unexpectedly.
Researchers now know that Hayward fault line is slipping - moving slowly, but surely
millimeter by millimeter. At the edge of the stadium, Richard Allen, a professor at Berkeley,
shows me the results of 80 years of such landslides: a 10 centimeters dislocation in concrete,
not elegantly bandaged, with a rusty metal band. We are both a little amused. What a pride to
build a stadium on a fault line! By the 1920s, when architects drew plans for a large football
stadium for California’s symbol university, they refused to let a geological imperfection stay in
their way.
The earthquake science was still at its beginnings, but it seems that the architects realized that
Hayward was a fault line, a place where two pieces of the Earth's crust move alongside each
other. As a result, they built bravely the stadium of two halves, like a coffee bean cut in two
by a line, more precisely the fault line. Each half of the stadium could move independently,
rising on the changing crust without any problem.
Then the fault line passes under the stadium. A map shows it separating the pillars of the very
northernmost gate. After that, it crosses the land to the south end and goes further down the
street to Oakland. The Hayward fault line, a long and deadly crack in the Earth's crust, cuts the
feet of the Berkeley Hills, and then crosses the campus of the University of California. It passes
under an amphitheater and a few dormitories - nothing serious, here are the freshman students
- it cranks to the concrete steps near the California Memorial Stadium. You can literally stride
the fault line, with one foot on one step and the other on the step below.