|
Our transcription: Along The San Andreas Fault and on active faults all over the world, blocks of the Earth's crust continuously try to slide past one another. This causes the rocks in the fault zone to bend and deform accumulating tremendous tectonic stress in the process. Eventually, this massive store of energy will exceed the breaking strength of the rocks triggering an earthquake. There is no doubt that this will occur. The principal questions are when and how strong the resulting earthquake will be. While earthquake research continues, the hopes of a reliable short-term forecasting system are still probably decades away. This task is complicated by the fact that each fault is unique, and successive earthquakes on a given fault can vary considerably. In the meantime, there are tangible steps that we can take to prepare ourselves for the earthquake that will surely occur. Nature has forced us to live with these sudden releases of energy, but knowledge gives us the power and the chance to survive them.
|
