Mendocino Triple Junction
This week I traveled to California to learn about the Mendocino Triple Junction. I did not even know this junction existed and so it is an exciting opportunity for me to learn about work in progress in the formation of our land mass.
The Pacific Plate borders the Gorda Plate whose southeastern most tip also meets the North American Plate forming the Mendocino Triple Junction.
The first piece of information I would want to know is in what direction and how quickly each plate is moving. This will tell me how active to expect the fault to be. Another thing I would want to know is seismicity, because while the speed and direction will tell me how active to expect the region to be, seismic activity will tell me how active the region actually is. I would also want to know what types of faults these are. Are they convergent, divergent, transform? How are these faults interacting together? All of these questions will tell me how dangerous the area is. I would also want to know how this fault was related to the most famous of all faults in the US, the San Andreas. This is more to satiate my own curiosity than for any useful purpose. Although if it is connected this could have useful value in as much as it could create a chain reaction of events to any connecting faults.
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