I see the word “thrust” in this story, and I also seem to recall it associated with the recent Chilean quakes.
Is this “Puente Hills” fault the same as the one in Chile?
The main faults all down the west coasts of both continents are of the strike/slip variety, but there are all kinds of tertiary fractures associated with the pressures they generate.
Thrust faults push one layer under the other. i.e. the movement is perpendicular to the fault line. There tends to be a lot of vertical motion.
A thrust fault is just one of the ways the earth slips. There are faults all along the coasts where the plates meet. All different kinds. All of them are Bush’s fault, of course.
Chile lies alongside a subduction zone where oceanic material is subsumed back into the mantle. Foci are relatively deep, 35 to 200km or more.
LA from roughly San Diego north to Crescent City is “transpressive” with strike-slip and thrust faults, mainly shallow focus to about from 5 to 15km or so. I’d rather live here than there.
This Whittier fault line is capable of producing what is called a “Super Shear” earthquake, where by the “Shear” or S/waves are channeled is such a way as being able to over take each other. What causes this is that the waves actually break the sound barrier while they are propagating outward from the fault quake.
There is much debate on what this actually means to the overall resulting damage from a quake, but it is thought that it holds the key as to why in some slip/strike earthquakes of the same magnitude, the damage is not.