Take a flight between Los Angeles and San Francisco and you see it about the time you finish your peanuts. Below you, running across central California, a scar
as vivid as any caught on a plastic-surgery show like Dr. 90210 or Extreme Makeover. The San Andreas Fault.One hundred years ago this month, the San Andreas changed history. The earthquake that struck the San Francisco Bay Area at 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, shattered cities, helped create modern earthquake science, and established the image of California as a Marilyn Monroe–like place where seductive beauty joins with fatal instability.
A century later, earth scientists are uncovering the secrets of San Francisco’s extreme makeover and the fault that caused it. “Like the San Andreas itself, our understanding of it has been locked,” says Mary Lou Zoback, senior research scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey. “Now it is starting to move.”
