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Seismology

New insights into old earthquakes

Nature volume 388, pages 122–123 (1997)Cite this article

Geodetic survey measurements conducted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continue to improve our understanding of the great San Francisco earthquake of 18 April 1906. These data are crucial to understanding the seismic strain history of the greater San Francisco Bay region, as exemplified in the latest work from Wayne Thatcher and colleagues, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research1.

The transient seismic waves unleashed by the slip in 1906 devastated San Francisco. Permanent displacements of the Earth's crust, which remained after the shaking stopped, caused other, albeit less dramatic, problems. For example, roads were beheaded by the fault. Permanent ground displacement distorted precise survey networks which had been painstakingly measured to map the coastline of California and San Francisco Bay. These surveys, begun in the 1850s, determined the relative latitude and longitude of landmarks with a precision of a few parts in a million (a few decimetres over a distance of 100 km). With earthquake displacements of many metres occurring in the quake, it was “decided to repair the old triangulation, damaged by the earthquake, by doing new triangulation”3.

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Figure 1: The greater San Francisco Bay region, showing the course of the San Andreas fault and the main locations discussed in the text.

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  1. Department of Geophysics, Stanford University, Stanford, 94305, California, USA

    Paul Segall

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Segall, P. New insights into old earthquakes. Nature 388, 122–123 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/40513

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