fault lines

When we went to Palm Springs for the teacher’s conference, we decided to do a field trip to visit the San Andreas fault. This involved some off-roading, with me as captain! We saw many tarantulas and visited the Carrizo plain, which lies on the Pacific plate side of the fault. An aerial photo of the fault is below.


We drove along tiny dirt roads in the middle of Steinbeck country. It was pretty awesome and now I can say that I’ve been to both the place where the North American plate diverges (in Iceland) and the place where it meets its end at the Pacific plate. I also learned a new rhyme to help remember the convection process in plate tectonics: “the older, the colder and hence, more dense”. (ie, the plates cool off and sink the further away from their diverging origins).