mustdotravels Vasquez Rocks in California 💘
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Los Angeles at night is a panoply of old and new buildings and signs lit up in a stationary parade each vying for your attention. This is my attempt at celebrating and preserving what glows, blinks, shines in this city between dusk and dawn. Like previous works, I discovered much of what is in this video in the process of making it. Everything was always there in the places I had been many times before but I was too busy to notice. It’s amazing what you find when stop and look!
New Fault Maps for Western Los Angeles County
Los Angeles County is full of faults. The San Andreas Fault may be the most famous fault in the United States and it is also the most active fault in Southern California, but the L.A. Basin itself literally only exists because of faulting. The mountains north of Los Angeles and the basin itself were moved northward and rotated during the development of the San Andreas system.
This process left a scarred and fractured landscape filled with faults. Even though the San Andreas has not moved in Central or Southern California since 1857, the Los Angeles basin commonly experiences earthquakes on these smaller faults. The 1994 Northridge earthquake occurred on one of these faults, as did the 1971 Sylmar Earthquake.
The 1994 Northridge Earthquake occurred on a blind thrust fault, a thrust fault at depth that lifts up a small hill in the center of that city. The city of Los Angeles has been dropped upon this fault filled landscape and often the faults even control the position of major arteries because they thrust up hills. The first of the photos on this post shows the Mormon Temple in Santa Monica, California, standing atop a small hill next to Santa Monica Boulevard. In fact, in this area, Santa Monica Boulevard runs directly along this small hill for a decent distance. A long linear hill in the middle of the Los Angeles basin – any guesses about what that could be?
The Mormon Temple sits atop a strand of the Santa Monica fault, a thrust fault that runs along the southern edge of the Santa Monica Mountains. In 1971, the Sylmar quake on the San Bernardino fault literally ripped apart houses that had been built in the fault zone. Following that quake, the state government mandated that any new construction in fault zones had to have plans for how buildings would survive an earthquake on the fault directly below.
Several building projects have run into these issues before. Building atop what turned out to be previously unknown faults has led to the demolition of buildings by colleges and the Los Angeles School District in the past several decades, at cost of millions of dollars.
The California State Geological Survey has been engaged in a multi-decade long project to map the faults in the basin due to these construction limits, but a lack of funding has delayed their completion. This is one of 4 fault maps released in the area of the LA Basin and in Napa County in northern California last week. It shows the active traces of the Santa Monica fault, the Hollywood Hills fault, and the Newport-Inglewood Fault in yellow, and areas at risk of liquefaction during earthquakes in dark and stippled zones.
A recent investigation by the L.A. times found that there were over a dozen real estate development projects approved in this fault zone in the past decade without plans for how the structures will survive movement on those faults. These maps will potentially control tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of development once they are finalized, so the delays on their completion may be costly in terms of both money and perhaps someday, if the faults do move, lives. If these maps existed, the Mormon Temple may not have been constructed at all, or it might have at least looked very different.
These faults do not move nearly as often as the San Andreas. The last rupture of the Santa Monica fault was an estimated 3000 years ago, and scientific studies suggest that this particular fault may rupture only once every 8000 years or so on average. However, with those long recurrence intervals, the variability is high, so the fault could rupture several times in short order and then be quiet for tens of thousands of years. If any of these faults do rupture, structures built near them could be split apart by several meters, directly threatening anyone inside.
Direct fault rupture is of course not the only hazard from seismic activity. When faults rupture, they also shake the surrounding area and that shaking, which we call an earthquake, can damage buildings and bring them down atop people as well. That is particularly risky in the areas marked liquefaction zones on these maps, but it is the case everywhere else as well. These hazard maps are one component of government management of those hazards, but of course not the only one. Once these maps are finalized, future development in a few areas of California will have to become slightly safer than it was beforehand. These areas are but a small slice of the job, but at least it is advancing.
-JBB
Image credits: CGS and Wikipedia: http://bit.ly/2uwOGlQ http://bit.ly/2uwGNNc
Reference: http://lat.ms/2tR7CJN
Source: facebook.com
Watch as cities all around the US light up at night. Both beautiful and a little sad since you can’t see anything above them.
Last summer’s San Andreas, starring everyone’s favorite wrestler-turned actor Dwayne Johnson, took in plenty of money at the box office, and became Warner Bros. highest grossing film of 2015; thus placing it as the studio’s fourteenth highest grossing film of all time worldwide. Despite critical ambivalence towards the feature’s earth shattering disaster film narrative, viewers all over the world took to the feature’s central family drama co-starring Carla Gugino (Watchmen), Alexandra Daddario (True Detective), and Paul Giamatti (Billions).
It might seem a little far fetched to imagine the film’s central narrative, largely concerning Johnson as a Los Angeles Fire Department Air Rescue pilot attempting to save his ex-wife and daughter after an earthquake decimates modern day San Francisco, California along the San Andreas Fault line, spawning a sequel. However, it would appear as though San Andreas 2 is going to become a real thing after all. According to THR, movie studio New Line Cinema and Johnson are both looking to produce a sequel to San Andreas, with the first film’s director, Brad Peyton, also along for the ride. Much of the rest of the cast and crew from the first San Andreas will also be returning, most notably including co-stars Gugino, Daddario, and Giamatti. However, the sequel will pick up screenwriters Neil Widener and Gavin James to pen a script concerning a much larger natural disaster event – one that will see the characters from the first film on the global stage, when the notorious Ring of Fire in the Pacific Ocean erupts.
To be fair, I can’t wait for the trailer.