I was in San Francisco at the Seismological Society of America Annual meeting yesterday...just for the day...it was a strange meeting...pretty much the only thing going on in the morning were talks in a single large room by politicians and a historian...including the mayor and governator. I had a poster in the afternoon...which, as usual, attracted relatively little attention. I did not go to any of the oral talks because I wanted to be at the posters and it was hard to figure out how the oral sessions worked. All in all, if I had stayed home and worked on papers, it would eventually have had more impact, given that putting the poster together and plotting it took 2 days, and the meeting and the travel to it 2 more days. I get more response posting on this page than going to meetings. Of interest to some, Mayor Newsome (??) said only 10% of San Francisco residents had disaster kit/pland (?). He mentioned the difficulty in California to raise taxes to retrofit, and the cost to retrofit a single hospital (I think 3/4 billion $)..

One cool poster was by my 3rd or 4th cousin...they discovered an active fault offsetting dated marine terraces along the northern California coast...they named it the Pacific Star fault. It may have several mm/yr of slip...is right-lateral. Pretty cool that you can discover a rather significant active fault in 2006. Someone said that much of that part of California is heavily vegetated and so geology is little known....hey, they did not have Tom Dibblee working that far north.....
Chris