Some of the fault maps are indeed horrible, some are probably OK. A few years ago at a SCEC meeting somone from the state showed a map of the Santa Barbara Channel, updated to 2002, and it was indeed horrible, and having no filter between what is left of my brain and my mouth I gave my opinion. The update to 2002 used no reference after about 1996. It just had no relationship to what we knew at that time.

On the other hand, the link is to the SCEC Community fault model. A lot of that is good (I'm involved in representing the faults for santa Barbara Channel and Santa Monica Bay). But, it has problems in my opinion in places. For example, our 3 SCEC posters showed that the faults within maybe 50 km of the coast from offshore Newport Beach to offshore San Diego have real problems.

I'm supposed to be providing improved and new representations to the CFM. But, I have not been getting this done. It is not clear to me how some faults offshore of Long Beach can be represented; they are complicated up shallow and it is hard to determine what the fault geometry is at depth. Some that I with others have provided have not been added.

The SCEC CFM is the way to go. The Harvard people put in a LOT of effort. I wanted there to be links to more information on the faults, such as limitations in the interpretation, but that has not happened. I don't think it is a great idea to have a bunch of different fault maps floating around, although a web page with fault information might be good (USGS has one, but as I said, its quality varies).

One of the limitations of my work is, except in santa Barbara Channel where we have precise dating (e.g., Nicholson et al 2006 EOS AGU and later abstracts), is that I work with long term deformation..over 1 million years or longer. I have not been working on slip rates for the last 10,000 or 100 years.

Chris

• SCEC community fault map