The annual @SCEC meeting in Palm Springs has begun this week, which means...
It's time for an #AlwaysAWindowSeat tour of the plate boundary thanks to my NorCal-SoCal flight. A thematic thread, complete with faults, infrastructure, trains, and clouds 😍:
Flight started at one of the [four] last places you see the San Andreas Fault on land.
Pop quiz, geo-Google-Earthers: what is the closest major airport in the world to a major fault line? Show your work
A view, at 3 different scales, of the water supply for San Francisco, the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct pipelines crossing the bay, slicing through hills and landing at the Pulgas Water Temple
The Stanford Linear Accelerator, 3.2 kilometers of science
Towering cumulonimbus incus clouds over the Sierra Nevada, with a few different levels of anvil tops
Difficult to make out, but I'm pretty sure in the midst of all these cumulonimbus clouds is the massive smoke plume from the mosquito fire, seen as a dark slanting cloud rising beneath the thunderheads
Superb flavors of clouds hanging out over Central California. Look at that cute little brontosaurus!
The amazing wine-glass canyon from which the Kern River emerges east of Bakersfield
A long freight train heading leftward toward the Tehachapi Loop ➰🚂 (didn't quite time it to see it taking the loop, but you can make the latter out on the left side of these photos)
The Piute Ponds capturing fresh runoff in the Mojave desert before it reaches the massive Rosamond [dry] lakebed / playa, a major stop for migratory birds in the vast dry Mojave
More fantastic little low cumulus clouds casting shadows over the desert, rare moisture from tropical Kay
The distinctly colored alluvium spread across the desert by flash floods that originate in the crushed up fault rocks of the San Andreas at Wrightwood
The Mojave River Dam, a massive flood-control structure narrowly confining the rugged "Deep Creek" from spilling too haphazardly northward into the high desert
Mojave desert + superb clouds 😍
Rain shower over Yucca Valley
Desert cumulonimbus complete with dark heavy rain beneath
The approach to Palm Springs, a desert city complete with its plate boundary fault
The pilot must've known I'm an earthquake geologist headed to an earthquake conference because he provided this close-up field visit to the San Andreas fault
Desert wash doing its washing! Rivulets of water running through the normally dry arroyo of the San Gorgonio River, winding up in a deep gravel pit
Thanks for taking the tour with me. It had all my favorite things, which I'm pretty sure are yours too because if you don't like faults and clouds and infrastructure I don't know what you're doing following my Twitter ;)
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Since a very common feature of this large Acapulco quake was the flashing sky, let's clear up what we're seeing here: These point-source blue-green flashes are electrical arcing between power distribution lines as they come in contact while swinging.
...These short-circuit the distribution lines and overload voltage transformers, causing loud, bright explosions and knocking out power. It's a super common phenom in strong wind and quakes, a result of human infrastructure.
...There are HEAPS of posts calling these "earthquake lights" or other such things. What you're seeing here is a well understood urban power grid phenomenon, not a natural phenomenon inherent to the earthquake process.
These days I have a long twice-daily rail/cycle commute between London and Oxford and I am SO here for it. I recently moved to London to live with my fiancé, and you could hardly find someone *less* bothered to take the train for 2-3 hours each day. 1/
It is magnificent to witness first-hand the steady operation of a vast mass transit system. Trains full of nearly a thousand people shuttle workers into and out of London every few minutes, through one of FOURTEEN bustling rail terminals 2/
A lot of people are bothered by crowds, but I absolutely marvel at the volume of people being disgorged in waves as train after train brings them in from the outskirts to the urban center. Here's the ebb and flow of passengers as a train arrives into Marylebone Station 3/