STUDY RAISES CONCERN OVER PALOS VERDES FAULT.Byline: Jane E. Allen Associated Press The Palos Verdes Fault that runs beneath the Port of Los Angeles The Port of Los Angeles is located on San Pedro Bay in the San Pedro neighborhood of Los Angeles, approximately 20 miles (30 km) south of downtown. Also called Los Angeles Harbor and WORLDPORT LA poses a greater seismic threat than previously thought and could rupture in a magnitude-7 to magnitude-7.2 earthquake, authors of a new study said Wednesday. With the 62-mile-long fault running directly beneath the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro, such a rupture poses a direct threat to the Port of Los Angeles, which commissioned the analysis. Strong shaking in a waterfront area, especially one built on landfill, brings the threat of liquefaction liquefaction, change of a substance from the solid or the gaseous state to the liquid state. Since the different states of matter correspond to different amounts of energy of the molecules making up the substance, energy in the form of heat must either be supplied to , in which the soil and water essentially turn to quicksand. ``They bent over backwards to find out the potential of the Palos Verdes Fault because it was a big unknown and affects future development and placement of facilities. . . . and future designs of the port,'' said Thomas K. Rockwell, a geological sciences professor at San Diego State University San Diego State University (SDSU), founded in 1897 as San Diego Normal School, is the largest and oldest higher education facility in the greater San Diego area (generally the City and County of San Diego), and is part of the California State University system. and study co-author. Palos Verdes is ``one of the bigger faults in the L.A. Basin, with one of the higher slip rates, therefore one of the more significant potential seismic sources,'' he said. According to the study, published in Wednesday's issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research Journal of Geophysical Research is a publication of the American Geophysical Union. JGR was formerly titled Terrestrial Magnetism from its founding by the AGU's president Louis A. , the fault is slipping about 3 millimeters a year. That's just one tenth the rate of the mighty San Andreas Fault, notes Jim Dolan, an earthquake geologist at the University of Southern California The U.S. News & World Report ranked USC 27th among all universities in the United States in its 2008 ranking of "America's Best Colleges", also designating it as one of the "most selective universities" for admitting 8,634 of the almost 34,000 who applied for freshman admission and the Southern California Earthquake Center The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), headquartered at the University of Southern California, was founded in 1991 with a mission to:
Most of the fault is offshore, although it's best known segment crosses along the base of the hills on the northeast edge of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. The fault extends offshore both to the northwest beneath Santa Monica Bay and to the southeast, where it merges with other faults near Santa Catalina Island and the coast. |
|
||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion