A Century has passed since the nerve-wrecking catastrophe has occurred. After the 1906 earthquake, Stanford geophysicists have revisited San Francisco’s “Big One”, where evidences made them paint a new picture of a fault that was ready to go and that ruptured farther and faster than previously supposed.
Professor Gregory C. Beroza claimed the 1906 earthquake as a “watershed event” because it convinced geologists that the fundamental theory of how earthquakes work was in fact correct.
“That fundamental theory is the elastic rebound hypothesis,” Beroza said. “It says that before an earthquake you get the Earth’s crust straining and that suddenly the strain is released during an earthquake. Prior to that people had hypothesized about elastic rebound, but for this earthquake there were measurements that showed that yes, this was completely consistent with that idea.”
Via: Physorg