The Geological Future of California

[IdeomotorPrisoner]

Just gonna take awhile.

I don't want to get too too technical with this, but every time there's a seismic event i get really into our plate tectonics. I remember the fun parts of geoscience.

So here's a random Geology post that I attempted to preemptively edit, but a lot still needed rewording. If I just stop rereading it and it won't happen. I tried.



How California Will Leave America.

While some may know there is "another plate boundary" I don't think people realize what is actually happening there.

The San Andreas fault is thought of as the Pacific/North American Plate boundary. But people may have not heard of the East California Shear Zone and Walker Lane.


(Relative motions of land provinces included)

Everything in America West of the Great Plains and East of California's Central Valley you can thank the Farallon Plate for, including The Sierra Nevada. Its subduction under North America into the mantle uplifted The Rocky Mountains first, and then turned California from a continental slab into the edge of North America.

Like the image:

l

But while California is the most recent land addition, and the Farralon Plate is almost fully subducted (fragments remain), the Pacific/North American interaction took over completely.

In the last few million years, there is something happening showing a process called "over-stepping" (inward-stepping) where one plate literally takes the land from the adjacent plate by reorganized transform faulting.

To put it simply, everything West of The San Andreas is moving North relative the Eastern side, but the Eastern side is ALSO Moving Northwest relative to REST of The North American Plate. Meaning The San Andreas Fault isn't really the edge of Pacific Plate's motion. The edge of respective Northward motion is where the Basin/Range meets the Eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. Lake Tahoe is one of many lakes on this unofficial indirect boundary of land motion. It's an indirect boundary because it is formed by the dragging effect of the plate pulling land away with it.

The East California Rift Zone at the edge of The Basin and Range Province movement is part of a larger sequence of deformation/extension in North America. Almost like at The Big Bend the plate snags and strains to keep moving anyway it can, resulting in deformation along these secondary fracture zones, more pronounced in the south, to accommodate overall plate motion..

While the official boundary is The San Andreas, maybe it shouldn't be.

Suffice it to say, California isn't falling into the ocean, but The Pacific plate is reorganizing its boundary and taking all the newest formed (geologically speaking) California land with it to the North.



California is destined to leave The Mainland. The same process of tectonic motion that stacked up California makes it the first to be ripped away by another plate moving a different relative direction.

This will of course all take millions upon millions of years, and humans will probably be dead or off to new planet before it happens, but if you plug all the relative motions of everything into you mind's visual processor and press play it seemingly rips along secondary boundary and extends a widening gulf between Nevada And California and takes the land of California away from Neveda.