>From today's New York Times:
See if you can spoot the instant name of the next L.A. punk band:
Scientists Identify a Major Fault Under Los Angeles
That Could Produce Quake....(and Band Name)
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
Using information once jealously guarded by oil and gas
companies, scientists have
for the first time identified a major fault under downtown
Los Angeles of a kind
whose existence there they previously could only infer.
They say it is capable of producing a devastating earthquake.
Scientists have for years believed that such faults, called
BLIND THRUSTS Dr. James Dolan, a
professor of geology at the University of Southern California.
The research adds support to the theory, emerging in the last
decade, that Los Angeles is
threatened more by faults like this one, which lie concealed
underground right inside the
city, than by the famous and much larger San Andreas fault, a
visible scar running across
the landscape 60 miles east of downtown.
Asked how many BLIND THRUST faults might lie beneath Los
Angeles, experts said yesterday
that they did not know. But Dr. Dolan said there was unlikely
to be another the size of the
newly identified one, which would measure 250 square miles on
the surface and is
believed to be at least nine miles deep.
It is "the poster child of BLIND THRUST faults underneath Los
Angeles," he said.
Dr. Dolan, who was not among the researchers, said they had
"nailed its location" and
determined that it was under increasing strain.
