From The Doc Searls Weblog:
Come along for the ride.
If you want a good sense of where this earthquake fits in The Big Picture, and you have a high speed connection, check out these animations from UCSB’s Geology Department. They’re amazing.
Plate Tectonic History of Southern California, 20 Ma to Present shows the Salinas Block riding up the West Coast of North Americal like a steamship scraping against a dock. Today’s quake was one tiny moment in the history of this travelling terrane.
This one, Southern California, 20Ma (million years ago) to Present, shows how the transverse (East-West) ranges, on which Santa Barbara rides, has rotated 180 degrees in a very short period of the Earth’s history.
Plio-Pleistocene Oblique Shortening against the San Andreas fault shows how we’re still in mid-collision between Baja and Southern California.