The San Andreas Fault is a geological stretches to a length of approximately 800 miles (1287 kilometers) through California. The fault is a right-lateral slip-fault that creates a boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate. All of the land west of this fault along the Pacific Plate is moving slowly to the northwest while all of the land east of the fault is moving the opposite, southeast because of plate tectonics.
The rate of the movement is about 1/6th of an inch (.6 cm) per year. The projected motion indicates that the Gulf of California will extend northward at the same time that the land west of the fault, including the Baja California peninsula along with California's coast slips past San Francisco. It will then continue going northwestward as an island mass heading to the Aleutian Trench. This is said to happen over a period of maybe twenty million years.
website: http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/s/san_andreas_fault.htm
picture: http://www.sanandreasfault.org/4020_A.jpg
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