San Andreas Fault

Welcome to Wallace Creek. Yes, you are looking at a creek. Wallace Creek may seem insignificant compared to other streams or rivers, after all, on most days of the year, it is bone dry. But it tells an important and exciting story.

As you can see, there are two sharp bends in the channel. The San Andreas fault also crosses Wallace Creek near those bends. Could the two tight bends be related to the fault?

The San Andreas fault cuts across the
surface of the Earth in front of you, from the northwest (your left) to the southeast (your right). Everything on the far side of the fault is sliding slowly to your right.

Wallace Creek once flowed straight across the fault. There were no bends. But repeated motion along the fault, due to large earthquakes every few hundred years, caused the upstream half of the channel to slide away from its downstream half.

The irregular shape of Wallace Creek reveals that the ground has moved here in the past, and warns that earthquakes will occur again in the future.

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