![]() The fault isn’t always a single line or deep “crack” in the ground dividing the two plates. The land on the North American Plate, including the San Bernardino Mountains and Mojave Desert to the north, is either stationary or moving very slowly to the southeast. That means, the land on the Pacific Plate, which would include the Los Angeles area, is moving northwest. That means, if you are standing on one side of the fault and looking towards the other side, the land on the other side of the fault would be moving to the right. The San Andreas is also a type of fault known as a right-lateral strike-slip fault. Learn more by Googling “plate tectonics”. Explaining further involves a lengthy discussion of plate tectonics, which is out of scope of this article. Earthquakes occur when that sliding turns into a sudden jerk of movement. This edge or division between the two plates is the San Andreas Fault. Both of these plates are experiencing what’s called continental drift and are literally sliding past (or rubbing against) each other very, very slowly. It’s actually a plate boundary – the boundary between the North American Plate and the Pacific Plate. Keep in mind that the San Andreas isn’t just a regular fault like many others, it is a significantly large fault. Here are some of those features explained. Those “signs” are what we call “fault features”. Throughout this tour, we’ll be visiting places where we can see signs of the San Andreas Fault. Using Gaia GPS’s Bedrock Geology layer plots the path of the San Andreas, making it easy to find many of the features described in this tour. See the Trip Map for an interactive map of our touring route and a link to download the GPX file we created containing the waypoints for plotting onto Gaia GPS the places we visit. It also explains the touring route as well as more details about each stop that we’ll visit. For those that have watched the virtual video tour above, reading this blog post will give you more insight into this segment of the San Andreas Fault.
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