Thursday, April 7, 2011

Day 7

Back in the USA! We are now in the Golden State of California! This is our last stop, because we are observing one last fault type...Transform Boundaries! (You would have guessed this if you were smart from my last post)

The San Andreas Fault is very interesting-here's a picture! I'll let you see for yourself.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44819000/jpg/_44819175_sanandreas.jpg
That's a huge "crack" in the earth! We drove along the San Andreas fault today, driving for around 100 miles, just to check out the fault. The San Andreas Fault is about 810 miles in length! We drove about 1/8 of the length of the Fault today! Although it was kind of boring, because all we could see for miles was barren landscape, it was fun to just marvel at the Earth's workings.

Of course, using this time that we drove, our teachers explained to us about what happened to create the San Andreas Fault.

They used this metaphor: You have two slices of pizza, one meat and one combo pizza. If you slid them together so they form a bigger triangle, and slid them forward and backward, the crumbs would fall from one pizza to the other. If you keep on sliding them back and forth, both pizzas would lose more and more crumbs, and then a gap will be noticeable. This is just the same thing that happened here!

After we got to the airport, and waiting for our flight back to Sea-Tac, we were kind of sad to think that our awesome tour of the Earth was over.

Well, our plane is boarding now. I'll see you in Seattle for a final couple blog posts!

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