Earthquake Country
November 4th, 2007
Podcast: Download (Duration: 33:10 — 30.4MB)
Picking up after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake in L.A.
The author of dozens and books and papers on seismology, Dr. Pat Abbott, Professor Emeritus at San Diego State University, makes time before embarking on a sea voyage to the Antarctic to discuss Southern California’s most dangerous seismic regions and faultlines, including the southern San Andreas Fault, the San Jacinto, Elsinore, and Newport-Inglewood Faults, and the history of the 1812 and 1857 Southern California earthquakes.
Dr. Abbott also takes listeners on a tour of some lesser-known earthquake faults in the region, including the north/south-trending Rose Canyon Fault in San Diego, and the possibilities for damaging earthquakes along it.
If you’ve never stopped and looked out at San Diego from a high vantage point like Cowles Mountain, Iron Mountain, or the view from Torrey Pines or Cabrillo, prepare to be amazed and possibly alarmed upon learning how San Diego’s regularly-spaced, hilly coastal intervals like Point Loma, Mt. Soledad, Torrey Pines, and on up to Signal Hill in Long Beach got there (and how the hills all have corresponding dips in the topography, like San Diego Bay and Mission Bay).
The explanation is simple: You live in Earthquake Country.
Two people died in Paso Robles in the 2003 San Simeon Quake.
Scotts Valley was hard-hit in the 1989 earthquake.
