Thread by @TTremblingEarth

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 ;)