slgwv

slgwv club

Posted: 21 Aug 2013


Taken: 04 Jul 2013

2 favorites     5 comments    150 visits

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Nevada Nevada


Lincoln Highway Lincoln Highway


Geology Geology



Keywords

quake
1954
earthquake
USA
Nevada
fault scarp
Fairview Peak
December 16


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150 visits


Fairview Peak Fault Scarp

Fairview Peak Fault Scarp
This is the ground break that occurred as a result of the 16 December 1954 Fairview Peak quake. It's still very prominent, being so young, but it's easy to recognize lots of older breaks in the area, and along other mountain range fronts in the Basin and Range, for that matter.

Don Barrett (aka DBs travels), Smiley Derleth have particularly liked this photo


Comments
 Blue rubber octopus
Blue rubber octopus club
Is this the actual point where the fault slipped?
10 years ago.
 slgwv
slgwv club
Yep. This is the break that occurred in a fraction of a second. Think of this crack propagating along the ground at a few kilometers per second. Local ground accelerations would have been >1 g--i.e. you'd've been thrown into the air. These quakes would have been catastrophic had they occurred in a populated area; as it was, there were no injuries and trivial property damage (an outhouse fell over).
10 years ago.
 Don Barrett (aka DBs travels)
Don Barrett (aka DBs… club
Thanks for the detail on this. I've not seen such specific, natural, visual indicator of a quake. Judging from the trees, this scarp is about 4 feet?
10 years ago.
 slgwv
slgwv club
Actually, it's more like 15 ft! Surface breaks like this are extremely common in earthquake-prone areas. This one, being so young, is really obvious, but (again) when you get your eyeballs calibrated you see them all over the place. Lots of those little ledges and benches and bluffs along the bases of mountain ranges in the Great Basin are old fault scarps. They get more rounded with age, as you might expect, and a Geology 100 exercise we used to do at UNR is to measure an old scarp profile in suburban Reno and estimate its age from the degree of rounding.
10 years ago.
Don Barrett (aka DBs… club has replied to slgwv club
I was looking at the upper tree, looking now at the one on the lower left I see how tall the scarp. Many years ago I used to hike with a man who could help you see what wasn't obvious about the landscape, even in upstate New York. I enjoyed that and appreciate the detail you provide here. Would be interesting to see landscape through your eyes once in awhile, though have to admit that my focus is more on what humans have done to the landscape.
10 years ago.

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