The Earth never stops moving, from its orbit around the sun to the people on it being busy as usual, to the inside of the Earth itself.
What you see here is tectonic plate movement along a fault line in Southern Asia, but we in Southern California are no strangers to similar events. Earthquakes happen all over the world, but we are so subject to them here because of where we live relative to the fault lines.
The cracks on the ground and the mountains that surround us are often due to these plates, as the internal movement of the planet Earth affects more than some people may realize.
“Plate tectonics, the theory that describes how the plates move around, is kind of like a unifying theory in geology that explains where mountains are, where volcanoes are, where deep ocean trenches are,” said Jason Burgdorfer, a geography and geology professor at College of the Canyons.
“The San Andreas fault runs through California from the Sea of Cortez, Gulf of California, near down the Sultan Sea, all the way up through San Francisco,” said Burgdorfer.
In 1994, southern California was struck by a 6.7 magnitude earthquake that saw many pieces of our home be devastated and destroyed by the disaster. Living along the San Andreas fault, we will see another magnitude of this, but what do we do when that happens?
“It’s a legitimate concern, obviously, cause of where we are located in Southern California, because of, as I mentioned, that lack of warning we would get. But to ease concerns, I think the biggest thing we can do is worry about what we can control,” said Roger Willcox, the Emergency Operations Analyst for the city of Santa Clarita.
“We can’t control if earthquakes is going to happen or where it might take place, but we can control how we plan for that. Whether it’s a specific residence, like maybe a single-family home, or all the way up to a business,” said Willcox.
