The San Andreas Fault extends for more than eight hundred miles from the northern Californian coast to the Gulf of California. We saw men being physically thrown down by the force of the earthquake. In 1857, the population density was extremely low and native people were the principal residents. An estimated 12,000 people … This earthquake occurred on the San Andreas fault, which ruptured from near Parkfield (in the Cholame Valley) almost to Wrightwood (a distance of about 300 kilometers); horizontal displacement of as much as 9 meters was observed on the Carrizo Plain. Later, as he continued his investigations, he expanded the number to twelve. Some artesian wells in the Santa Clara Valley quit flowing, whereas others increased their flow, and new springs bubbled up near Santa Barbara and San Fernando. They did not have our present knowledge of earthquakes so, understandably, they had no idea what might happen next. Today, a single county may be the custodian of most of the nation’s wealth. Both events resulted from right-lateral movement on the San Andreas Fault, and caused extensive damage over a wide area. Then on January 17, 1994, a 6.7 earthquake hit the Northridge area. Shocks of strength 7 on the Modified Mercalli Scale were experienced everywhere within this area.

More than twenty years after the publication of their article, the San Andreas Fault still awaits its next magnitude 8 event. Charles Real of the California Division of Mines and Geology used the records of the Monterey County Assessor's Office to locate Mr. Parkinson's property, a few kilometers northwest of Parkfield, a location that spanned a zone of cracks observed after the 1966 Parkfield earthquake. In the early years of the present century its population is thirty-five million and growing at a rate that is above the national average. From data such as these it is reasonable to conclude that a repeat of the 1857 earthquake today would not cause serious damage to low-rise buildings in Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, a city of 4,000 people at that time, minor damage was done to homes. The duration of each of these two strong aftershocks was short, much less than the timing of the main shock, and they continued for three minutes in San Bernardino and two minutes in Fort Tejon. Slight changes in the earth’s rotation or in its normal distance from the sun can change the behavior of the tectonic plates that are a vital causal factor in California’s earthquakes. Most of these records deal with human reactions and damage to buildings, all of which were either of adobe or brick construction. What we do know is that several meters of sudden right-lateral slip on the San Andreas fault produced shaking that lasted 1 to 3 minutes and that was felt over more than 350,000 square kilometers of central and southern California. One of the largest recorded earthquakes in the United States, with an estimated moment magnitude of 7.9, it ruptured the southern part of the San Andreas Fault for a length of about 225 miles (350 kilometers), between Parkfield and Wrightwood. These two attempts, one looking back twenty million years and the other 1,400 years, are a useful reminder of the great difficulties in predicting earthquakes. Urbanization has added its own urgency to the demand for earthquake prediction. Both events resulted from right-lateral movement on the San Andreas Fault, and caused extensive damage over a wide area. The main area affected, however, while still large, is limited to a hundred-mile stretch of territory from 34 degrees north to 36.5 degrees north. When might another magnitude 8 earthquake occur here? It is at the heart of almost all California’s earthquakes. All around southern and central California, the strong shaking caused by the 1857 shock was reported to have lasted for at least one minute, possibly two or three! Many factors interfere with their movements, including the presence of subsidiary faults, different types of rock, and the differential rates of plate movements because they are moving on the globe, a curved, not a flat surface. 1857 Fort Tejon Earthquake. Nevertheless, the attempts continue and, as mentioned in the introduction, they have expanded in China and Japan to observations of the behavior of wildlife just prior to earthquakes. Property loss was heavy at Fort Tejon as five buildings were severely damaged and several others sustained moderate damage. Also, the maximum fault movement of about 9 … The intensity experienced in Los Angeles, at that time a pueblo in the location we know today as downtown, was described as moderate. Deductions from such data as well as from the earlier ones are not reliable. Most of the damaged buildings were of unreinforced masonry.

In either case, in a frontier location like this, the masonry used would be weak so that minor shocks could be very destructive. The second one arrived a week later. In this year of 1857, the gold rush was in its ninth year of diggings and things were beginning to slow down. Because few people lived in the San Joaquin Valley and surrounding mountains in those days, the Tejon quake was remote and this limited its impact.

The earthquake itself caused one fatality, evidence of the low density of population. It added fifteen million since 1970. A report in the Salinas City Index (dated February 4, 1881) noted that several chimneys in Imusdale, the ancestral town of Parkfield, were knocked down by the 1881 shocks. There were many mild aftershocks to this momentous earthquake of 1857 but among them two seemed to have been sufficiently strong to attract the attention of several newspapers. One geologist used evidences of past displacements on the fault, deformations of the crust, and distances between the two tectonic plates that move on opposite sides of the fault to propose a timetable for the future. 48, No. Thus, if one were to calculate the strain since 1857, it would amount to twelve and a half feet by the year 2007. The 1906 San Francisco guake was 7.8 and that in Owens Valley was 7.4. There are so many elements of our total environment that human society can now control, and so much technology with which we can do what is needed, that the quest for answers to earthquake prediction must be pursued. However, evidence indicates that foreshocks to the quake may have occurred at Parkfield (shown by the red circle in the map above), which would place the epicenter in that area. Its population was 53,000 and the only other city, Sacramento, the state capital, had a population of 12,000. Typical newspaper accounts of the shocks experienced were as follows: we all ran outside as our building cracked because we saw that others had collapsed. The massive Indonesian earthquake of December, 2004, was sufficiently powerful to do what had never before been observed in human history. In 1857, the total population of California was not much more than 10,000, perhaps not even as great as that. The epicenter of the 1857 event was not at Fort Tejon but rather about sixty miles farther north but, because Fort Tejon was a well-known place in a thinly populated area, the earthquake was named after it. It slowed down for a fraction of a second the earth’s rate of rotation. The first big gold rush of the many that would happen later in the nineteenth century— in the Klondike, Australia and South Africa—had created a feverish scramble among people everywhere to get to California and be the first finder of the mother lode, the place with the biggest gold nuggets. Ground openings and fissures were reported from Sacramento to the delta of the Colorado River and changes in the flows of rivers occurred in several locations. Most of the state’s people live in cities and San Francisco is now a huge urban agglomeration, not just a single city as it was in 1906. Map showing the San Andreas fault in green, which caused the 1857 Fort Tejon eathquake. California in 1857 was thinly populated with Europeans, except for the two dominant settlements, San Francisco and Sacramento. Sieh’s findings were incorporated into the prediction that the Geological Survey was asked to provide to the National Security Council. That question has occupied the minds of many geologists. 2, 2013 ©2013 by the University of Texas Press DOI: 1 0.7560/IC48202 .

Required fields are marked *. The few reports by those who felt the February 2, 1881 shock indicates that this earthquake had intensity similar to those reported from more recent Parkfield main shocks. Nonetheless, the quake left a surface rupture of 225 miles, which is shown below, with up to 30 feet of vertical displacement. The epicenter of the Tejon quake is not known with certainty, but some suggest is was at Fort Tejon, near the middle of the surface rupture where the reported shaking was strongest. In 1985, for example, two geologists wrote a major article on predicting future San Andreas earthquakes in the journal Scientific American. When the earthquake actual hit strong shaking ensued, which lasted from one to three minutes. (Public domain.) The earthquake itself caused one fatality, evidence of the low density of population. Water from the Mokelumne and Los Angeles Rivers ran over their banks as well, leaving dry river beds in places, and supposedly the water of Tulare Lake was thrown shoreward, leaving fish stranded miles from shore on a dry lakebed. The 7.9 magnitude Tejon Earthquake (with an intensity of perhaps 8.25), which struck about 8:20 am on the morning of Jan. 9, 1857 is considered by many to be the largest historic earthquake that California has witnessed, vying for that title with the better known San Francisco quake of 1906. From Marysville, fifty miles north of Sacramento, all the way to the southern border of the state and eastward as far as Las Vegas some level of shock was experienced. Santa Clara County suffered heavy damage in the 1906 earthquake; today it is the principal home to the nation’s supplies of semi-conductors. If we compare San Francisco in 1906 with Fort Tejon in 1857, the break in the San Andreas Fault was longer in the former … This and other changes to the landscape were more extensive and impressive than those associated with the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, leading most seismolgists to consider the Tejon quake to be the larger of the two.

scribed" in "information" about the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake.7 Information àf Culture, Vol. They noted that the time interval from the 1857 earthquake was 128 years at the time of their writing and added that this figure was alarmingly close to Sieh’s estimate for a recurrence. It was fortunate for us today, as we seek to understand better the huge earthquake of 1857, that there were newspaper descriptions and other reports of the event published in these two cities at the time and we can examine these accounts today.

Both were described as severe but there was no record of damage. This earthquake caused 87 deaths and a FEMA – estimated $40 billion in property damage. Interaction between the North American and Pacific plates along this fault takes place within an elongate zone, broadening from sixty miles at its north end to three times that width in southern California. The Santa Cruz and Ventura missions were damaged, and other missions sustained cracks. On January 9, 1857, California’s greatest ever earthquake struck the central part of the state near the San Andreas Fault. The few reports by those who felt the February 2, 1881 shock indicates that this earthquake had intensity similar to those reported from more recent Parkfield main shocks. Its magnitude was 7.9. The Owens Valley Earthquake and the great San Francisco event of 1906 make up, with Fort Tejon, California’s three biggest historical earthquakes. There was less and less gold to be found but, in the few years of frantic efforts to strike it rich, San Francisco had become a big city, the only big city west of the Rockies.

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