The Cajon Pass Hell Gate

[BeyondKnowledge]

You don't need to use a bomb to trigger a fault, water will do. 

Drill into near the faults and pump water in. It will soften up he land and lubricate the fault. A line of holes on both sides 25 to 50 miles apart might do. You will get many smaller less damaging earthquakes. The more holes the less water in each and the weaker the earthquakes that will be triggered.

The problems are where to get the water and who will pay for the damage from ententional earthquakes.

[IdeomotorPrisoner]

But this is an old school doom porn thread, so it needs an ironic song performance.

So how about Ænema by Tool perforced at Glen Helen Amphitheater in San Bernardino, literaly on top of the San Andreas Fault by the 215? 

[IdeomotorPrisoner]

You don't need to use a bomb to trigger a fault, water will do. 

Drill into near the faults and pump water in. It will soften up he land and lubricate the fault. A line of holes on both sides 25 to 50 miles apart might do. You will get many smaller less damaging earthquakes. The more holes the less water in each and the weaker the earthquakes that will be triggered.

The problems are where to get the water and who will pay for the damage from ententional earthquakes.

You gonna frack the shit out the San Andreas or what? 

You're basically trying to induce two continents that are stuck to slip. 

There is a 150-200 mile stretch on the Southern segment that doesnt creep.

The central segment near Parkfield creeps along, but this segment in question is entirely locked along almost its entire stretch. 

So in the wildest self-destructive and theoretical land of "Why the fuck did we try this?" you could plausibly place several really deep wastewater injection wells (15-20 km as opposed to 3-5 km) along the locked segment and apply some lube, but you'd be advised to evacuate about 10 million people first, if it even works at all, or we have the technology to do so. 

Even in that case, you DONT STOP The Big One. It still happens as catastrophically as ever, the loss of life would be most massive along the length of the rupture and you still wouldnt know EXACTLY when its going to go anymore then a West Texas or Oklahoma oil-triggered earthquake.

Like with trying to nuke a supervolcano, you dont prevent the event from being catastrophic in the same way.

[ArMaP]

Same old modern geological methods as always. Radio carbon dated sediment layers and tree rings all fed into a computer model.

The site looked at specifically is The Wightwood Paleoseismic Site about 8 miles from the "Hell Gate," in the San Gabriel Mountains. 

Over the last 1500 years there have been 14 "big ones" identified using these indirect approximation methods.  Like figuring out Cascadia's last major event was in 1700 by dating coastal ghost forests and sediments up the Columbia River.

In the San Gabriel mountains they dug trenches across the fault and looked for buried organic material trapped by ground displacement. Or if the earthquake shifts a trees angle, the tree will compensate by growing thicker rings on the compromised side, which can be dated.

What I meant was although they can get an idea of when big earthquakes happened, but I don't think they really can know the stress levels before those earthquakes, as situations change.

[IdeomotorPrisoner]

All hail the computer model.  Relative stress levels are determined by the length of the data set and averages.

Add expected slip rate to magnitude of events to the length of downtime and let a magic box color-code time-lapsed images of assumed stress levels over time.

= Worst in 1000 years.

* And for a grinding slip like the Pacific against The North American Plate being so overall consistent for the last serveral million years, there is nothing to infer a different average stress threshold, even as it slowly rotates mountains.

[BeyondKnowledge]

You gonna frack the shit out the San Andreas or what? 

You're basically trying to induce two continents that are stuck to slip. 

There is a 150-200 mile stretch on the Southern segment that doesnt creep.

The central segment near Parkfield creeps along, but this segment in question is entirely locked along almost its entire stretch. 

So in the wildest self-destructive and theoretical land of "Why the fuck did we try this?" you could plausibly place several really deep wastewater injection wells (15-20 km as opposed to 3-5 km) along the locked segment and apply some lube, but you'd be advised to evacuate about 10 million people first, if it even works at all, or we have the technology to do so. 

Even in that case, you DONT STOP The Big One. It still happens as catastrophically as ever, the loss of life would be most massive along the length of the rupture and you still wouldnt know EXACTLY when its going to go anymore then a West Texas or Oklahoma oil-triggered earthquake.

Like with trying to nuke a supervolcano, you dont prevent the event from being catastrophic in the same way.

I never said it was a good idea just better than explosives and possibly better than doing nothing. Google seems to be working on the technology to do this. 




There are risks, but then there are risks just living on top of a known fault line. Many people accept those risks throughout their lives.

The same goes for supervolcanoes, many people knowingly live on them. They know they may erupt but they think the risk is worth it for some reason.