The Walker Lane is a geologic trough roughly aligned with the

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

Nevada Nevada ( ; ) is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, Western region of the United States. It is bordered by Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast, and Utah to the east. N ...

border southward to where

Death Valley Death Valley is a desert valley in Eastern California, in the northern Mojave Desert, bordering the Great Basin Desert. During summer, it is the Highest temperature recorded on Earth, hottest place on Earth. Death Valley's Badwater Basin is the ...

intersects the

Garlock Fault The Garlock Fault is a left-lateral strike-slip fault running northeast–southwest along the north margins of the Mojave Desert of Southern California, for much of its length along the southern base of the Tehachapi Mountains. Geography Stretc ...

, a major left lateral, or sinistral,

strike-slip fault In geology, a fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock across which there has been significant displacement as a result of rock-mass movements. Large faults within Earth's crust result from the action of plate tectonic ...

. The north-northwest end of the Walker Lane is between Pyramid Lake in Nevada and California's

Lassen Peak Lassen Peak ( ), commonly referred to as Mount Lassen, is a lava dome volcano and the southernmost active volcano in the Cascade Range of the Western United States. Located in the Shasta Cascade region of Northern California, it is part of the ...

where the Honey Lake Fault Zone, the Warm Springs Valley Fault, and the Pyramid Lake Fault Zone meet the transverse tectonic zone forming the southern boundary of the

Modoc Plateau __NOTOC__ The Modoc Plateau lies in the northeast corner of California as well as parts of Oregon and Nevada. Nearly of the Modoc National Forest are on the plateau between the Medicine Lake Highlands in the west and the Warner Mountains in the ...

and

Columbia Plateau The Columbia Plateau is a geologic and geographic region that lies across parts of the U.S. states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. It is a wide flood basalt plateau between the Cascade Range and the Rocky Mountains, cut through by the Columbia ...

provinces. The Walker Lane takes up 15 to 25 percent of the boundary motion between the

Pacific Plate The Pacific Plate is an oceanic tectonic plate that lies beneath the Pacific Ocean. At , it is the largest tectonic plate. The plate first came into existence 190 million years ago, at the triple junction between the Farallon, Phoenix, and Iza ...

and the

North American Plate The North American Plate is a tectonic plate covering most of North America, Cuba, the Bahamas, extreme northeastern Asia, and parts of Iceland and the Azores. With an area of , it is the Earth's second largest tectonic plate, behind the Pacific ...

, the other 75 percent being taken up by the

San Andreas Fault The San Andreas Fault is a continental transform fault that extends roughly through California. It forms the tectonics, tectonic boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate, and its motion is Fault (geology)#Strike-slip fau ...

system to the west. The Walker Lane may represent an incipient major

transform fault A transform fault or transform boundary, is a fault along a plate boundary where the motion is predominantly horizontal. It ends abruptly where it connects to another plate boundary, either another transform, a spreading ridge, or a subductio ...

zone which could replace the San Andreas as the plate boundary in the future. The Walker Lane deformation belt also accommodates nearly 12 mm/yr of

dextral shear Sinistral and dextral, in some scientific fields, are the two types of chirality ("handedness") or relative direction. The terms are derived from the Latin words for "left" (''sinister'') and "right" (''dexter''). Other disciplines use different ...

between the Sierra Nevada–Great Valley Block and

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Car ...

. The belt is characterized by the northwest-striking trans-current faults and co-evolutionary dip-slip faults formed as result of a spatially segregated displacement field.

Eastern California shear zone

The eastern California shear zone is the portion of the Walker Lane that extends south from

Owens Valley Owens Valley (Numic Numic is a branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It includes seven languages spoken by Native American peoples traditionally living in the Great Basin, Colorado River basin, Snake River basin, and southern Great Pl ...

, and continues across and south of the Garlock Fault, across the

Mojave Desert The Mojave Desert ( ; mov, Hayikwiir Mat'aar; es, Desierto de Mojave) is a desert in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada mountains in the Southwestern United States. It is named for the indigenous Mojave people. It is located primarily in ...

to the

. Several 7+ earthquakes have occurred along the eastern California shear zone, including the

1992 Landers earthquake The 1992 Landers earthquake occurred on Sunday, June 28 with an epicenter near the town of Landers, California, Landers, California, in San Bernardino County. The shock had a Moment magnitude scale, moment magnitude of 7.3 and a maximum Mercalli ...

, 1999 Hector Mine earthquake, the

2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes The 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes (more commonly referred to in scientific literature as the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence) of July 4 and 5 occurred north and northeast of the town of Ridgecrest, California located in Kern County and ...

sequence, as well as the massive 1872 Lone Pine earthquake in the Owens Valley.

Eastern California shear zone

References

Further reading