From an email from SCEC....chris

SCEC News is pleased to announce another free USGS Public Lecture to be held
on Thursday, September 29th at 8pm. Dr. Mary Lou Zoback of the USGS Menlo
Park office will present "The 1906 Earthquake: Lessons Learned and Lessons
Forgotten." A synopsis is given below.

Please join the USGS Pasadena office for the fifth year of their Public
Lecture Series! All lectures are free and begin at 8 pm in Beckman
Institute Auditorium on the Caltech campus in Pasadena. There is plenty of
free parking available.

For more information see http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/info/lectures/ or call
626-583-6801.

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The 1906 Mw7.8 earthquake on the northern San Andreas Fault marked the birth
of modern earthquake science. For the first time, the effects and impacts
of a major seismic event were systematically investigated and documented in
a detailed report. Scientists not only carefully mapped the entire
200-mile-long fault rupture, but they also mapped the fault south to the
Mexican border, showing the San Andreas as a major geologic structure for
the first time. They showed that the strongest shaking occurred in areas of
"made land" (fill) and soft sediment including China Basin and the present
day Marina district -- two San Francisco neighborhoods heavily damaged again
in 1989 during the Loma Prieta earthquake. Their surveys of damage to
structures concluded that destruction was closely related to building design
and construction -- a painful lesson oft repeated around the world. Perhaps
the most important scientific result to come out of the 1906 earthquake was
the concept of an earthquake cycle. As earthquake science evolves,
reanalysis of the 1906 earthquake data continues to yield new insights about
that event and the behavior of large strike-slip faults in general. Looking
to the future, a dense array of continuous GPS recorders in N. California,
part of EarthScope's Plate Boundary Observatory, can search for fault
interactions and determine if an acceleration of strain rate precedes the
next big earthquake as it may have prior to 1906. Come and find out how we
are still learning from "the big one" that happened 100 years ago!