Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/109

Rh feet and have an average of about 10 feet. At one place (Fig. 5) a road was offset 20 feet, but in this case the underlying ground was wet alluvium and part of its movement may have been due to a flowing of the soft material. There was also some vertical change, but this was not everywhere in the same direction and its amount was comparatively small. At many points the land west of the fault appears to have risen one or two feet as compared with the land at the east.

The surface manifestation is not usually a simple crack, but a disturbed zone a few feet broad, the earth within the zone being split into blocks which show more or less twisting or rotation. In some places the zone is slightly depressed below the adjoining surfaces, and elsewhere slightly elevated. Other disturbances of the surface were associated with the earthquake, but the track of the central fault has a character of its own, a character with which the field workers soon became familiar, so that it could be clearly identified. It came to be distinguished in their conversation and note-books as 'the rift.' For considerable distances the rift is single, but elsewhere it is more or less divided, the parts lying within a few rods of one another and being approximately parallel. There are also branches parting from the main rift at various angles and gradually dying out in the adjacent country, and in some of these the belt of disturbance is broad and complicated (Fig. 7). There are also outlying cracks occurring within a mile or two of the central rift and having irregular courses, and these may probably be referred to the same general system of rock strains.

Other cracks are distinctly secondary in character; that is to say. they are not due directly to the stresses and strains by which the fault was made, but are results of the earthquake itself. The jar constituting the earthquake, or in technical language the earthquake wave, as it travels through rock and earth produces temporary compressions and other strains, and these often occasion cracks at the surface. Where the material is elastic such secondary cracks merely open and close, leaving the ground with its original form; but where it is inelastic and incoherent, as in the case of young alluvial formations and artificial