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Topic: Useless Facts Especially for California OUCH (Read 283 times) |
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Hound_Dogg
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Useless Facts Especially for California OUCH
« on: Dec 16th, 2002, 11:04am » |
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Today's useless fact - How soon is California going to fall into
the ocean?
Not soon enough for some people. (Don't worry, they're just
envious.) But let's get clear on one thing. The problem isn't
that California is sinking, it's that it's sliding sideways-
toward the Aleutian Islands, off the coast of Alaska. Do you know
what the weather is like in the Aleutian Islands? Rotten, that's
what. But California won't arrive there for 50 million years, so
you don't have to break out the mukluks just yet.
The "seam" in California (the crack where the two parts are
sliding by one another) is called the San Andreas Fault. The west
side of the fault is sliding past the east side at the rate of
two inches per year.
This is important for several reasons. For one thing, if you're
putting down carpet in California, you definitely don't want to
staple any over the San Andreas Fault. More important, the two
parts of the state don't slide past each other smoothly. Instead,
they get snagged, like when you're trying to get past a tree in
the forest and a branch catches on your pants.
What happens next? The same thing that sometimes happens when you
try to get your pants leg loose. You tug and tug until it breaks
loose and you topple over backward.
In California, as the two pieces of the state try unsuccessfully
to get past one another, the pressure builds up more and more.
Then blammo, something snaps and it's earthquake city.
Unfortunately for Californians, that could happen a lot sooner
than 50 million years.
~source used: "Know It All"
by Ed Zotti
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