I got my SCEC proposal in and my annual report is due next Monday. So, I am spending today and tomorrow seeing how fast I can write a draft of a scientific paper...intended for Nature, Science, or Geology....(2 to 4 pages, published). It seems that the faster I write, the less junk and detail it gets weighed down with. I'm taking work with former student, KB in oilpatch, and his draft.....and kind of not using his draft (which he will use for his thesis)...but he will get a shot at rewriting my text and will probably be first author. This paper is on the Palos Verdes anticlinorium, and the giant low-angle faults responsible for it. When you fly into LAX on a clear day...you see Palos Verdes uplift...which if it was not connected to the mainland by rapid sedimentation would be one of the smaller of the Channel islands...not much of a mountain range...called hills for a reason. But, what you see is the tip of the iceberg...the northeast side is drowned in sediment, and the northwest, southeast, and southwest sides are drowned by the Pacific ocean...and the southwest side is partly buried below water by sediment. What you see is the tip of the iceberg. The whole structure is 70 km-long, and I guess 30 km wide or something like that. It is about 5 km-high...from its buried base. This is not the Gulf of Mexico...it is not a salt or shale diapir...it did not just grow by itself. It grew by thrust faulting (and by some oblique-slip faulting). It took a lot of really big earthquakes to make a buried mountain this big. The question is whether the whole thing is still active, and how active.

There is a relation between this paper, KB's thesis, and earthquake prediction on this page. I am very confident that we are correct in the various things that we assert. But, we cannot prove a lot of this...it is based on logical arguments and mapping. I talked to an editor of the journal Nature a few years ago...and to be accepted a paper must be of wide interest (no problem), and have a high probability of being correct. It will be difficult to prove that we are correct in a 2 to 4 page paper. So, our arguments must be convincing. Some on this page are convinced that their methods are correct. But, for various reasons, they are unable to make a convincing scientific argument that their methods are plausible. So, we are left with evalations of predictions to show whether or not there is any there, there.
If we cannot make this short paper fly (N.S. and several others are also involved), then we will have to try a much longer paper with more figures and use much more of KB's text.
Chris