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Earth science

Strength of the San Andreas

Nature volume 405, pages 31–32 (2000)Cite this article

Knowledge of the rates of motion and the long-term record of earthquakes along the San Andreas fault system in California has improved markedly over the past 25 years. Such knowledge has made possible long-term estimates of earthquake probability, typically for periods of 30 years1. But our understanding of the physics of faulting remains woefully inadequate — questions regarding the feasibility of shorter-term predictions, and whether the occurrence of one earthquake increases the probability of an earthquake on another fault, remain unanswered.

There seems little doubt that laboratory friction data are applicable to the faulted crust within Earth's relatively rigid lithospheric plates. Data from deep boreholes around the world show high levels of shear stress at depth, consistent with the laboratory friction experiments4. Scholz argues that the San Andreas (and by inference the other major faults which bound lithospheric plates) has essentially the same frictional strength as the faulted crust within the plates — in other words, that the hundreds of kilometres of offset that have occurred along the fault have been accomplished without significant weakening of the fault with respect to the surrounding brittle crust.

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Figure 1: The San Andreas fault.

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  1. Department of Geophysics Stanford University, Stanford, 94303, California, USA

    Mark D. Zoback

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  1. Mark D. Zoback
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Correspondence to Mark D. Zoback.

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Zoback, M. Strength of the San Andreas. Nature 405, 31–32 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35011181

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