USGS in Menlo Park: Earthquake central USGS in Menlo Park: Earthquake central (July 07, 2004)

The San Andreas Fault is likely the reason USGS is still in Menlo Park, despite sky-high costs for rents and housing.

For more than 40 years, local scientists have studied and measured that boundary, where the Pacific plate of the earth's crust grinds, crunches, and occasionally jerks, past the North American plate.

Some can remember when Bob Wallace of Portola Valley, Menlo Park's grand old man of earthquake science, stood by Dan Rather near the rubble of the Cypress Freeway in Oakland in 1989. His message: "The great earthquake is still to come."

Bill Ellsworth, current head of the USGS Earthquake Hazards Team based in Menlo Park, is focusing on a combination of basic research and practical information that helps prepare for future quakes.

Bay Area residents face a 62-percent probability of enduring at least one major earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or larger by 2032, the USGS warned in a 2002 forecast. The coming quake is slightly more likely to rupture the Hayward and Rogers Creek Fault in the East and North Bay (27 percent), than the San Andreas Fault on the Peninsula (21 percent.) In any case, the whole area would shake, and there would be serious damage.

Mr. Ellsworth, a resident of Menlo Park, urged people to prepare for an earthquake comparable to Loma Prieta or worse. "We can mitigate losses, but we must act," he said. "Unreinforced brick buildings are the killers."

Basic research

At last, scientists are really looking into the San Andreas Fault -- deep down where the rocks tear in an earthquake.

A hole is being drilled 2.4 miles deep into the fault near Parkfield, a boondock town about halfway to Los Angeles, where there are frequent, small earthquakes. "For the first time we are drilling into a major active fault to really understand how it works," says Mr. Ellsworth.

The San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD) is a $2.4 million project funded by the National Science Foundation and led by scientists from USGS and Stanford.

Mr. Ellsworth, one of the lead investigators, looks forward to learning how an active fault works One of the puzzles is why no one has been able to measure heat from two huge plates grinding past each other. "Where did the heat go?" he asks.

"Our goal is to drill into the middle of a small earthquake," Mr. Ellsworth says. "We want to watch the accumulation of strain and its release."

Real time

Thanks to technology and the Internet, anyone with a computer can get right-now information on earthquakes around the world. Just enter http://quake.usgs.gov, or enter "earthquake" on Google, to go to the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program site.

Mr. Ellsworth is particularly interested in online responses from people who feel a quake and click on, "Did you feel it?" A 4.2 earthquake near Chicago on June 28 drew 6,000 responses within hours. "This is actually very important information to us," Mr. Ellsworth says. "It allows us to apply western data to eastern earthquakes."

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