Past Interval speaker Geoff Manaugh has written a feature for the May issue of WIRED about the Walker Lane in the Eastern Sierra, “an emerging fault system along the Nevada border [that] is shaking up the tech industry’s latest frontier—and only a small group of scientists is paying attention.”
The tools of contemporary geology, including GPS, lidar, computer simulations, and exhaustive fieldwork, have made the Walker Lane visible as never before. But it was there all along, hidden in the region’s faults and volcanoes, biding its time. If Faulds is right—if the waters of the Pacific really are inbound north to Reno—then learning to see the signs of tectonic change is both one of the great geologic puzzles of our time and one of the field’s most practical applications. The proof of his hypothesis could be one major earthquake away.
Via WIRED.
