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Serial Ruptures Of The San Andreas Fault, Carrizo Plain, California, Revealed By Three-Dimensional Excavations, Jing Liu-Zeng, Yann Klinger, Kerry Sieh, Charles Rubin, Gordon Seitz

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences

It is poorly known if fault slip repeats regularly through many earthquake cycles. Well‐documented measurements of successive slips rarely span more than three earthquake cycles. In this paper, we present evidence of six sequential offsets across the San Andreas fault at a site in the Carrizo Plain, using stream channels as piercing lines. We opened a latticework of trenches across the offset channels on both sides of the fault to expose their subsurface stratigraphy. We can correlate the channels across the fault on the basis of their elevations, shapes, stratigraphy, and ages. The three‐dimensional excavations allow us to locate accurately …