Kern Canyon Fault

rdf:langString Kern Canyon Fault

rdf:langString The Kern Canyon Fault (Late-Quaternary Active Kern Canyon Fault) is a dextral strike-slip fault (horizontal) that runs roughly around 150 km (93 mi) beside the Kern River Canyon through the mountainous area of the Southern Sierra Nevada Batholith. The fault was a reverse fault in the Early Cretaceous epoch during the primal stages of the Farallon Plate subduction beneath the North American Continental Plate and fully transitioned into a strike-slip shear zone during the Late Cretaceous. Professor Robert W. Webb of the University of Chicago was the first to research the fault in 1936; He found a lava flow (Pliocene age) that covered the northern end of the fault trace where the Little Kern and Kern River coincided. Without any evidence of deformation affecting the hardened lava and without any evidence found previously when investigating the fault line, Webb deemed the fault to be inactive. In 2007, Professor Elisabeth Nadin (University of Alaska Fairbanks) discovered that while mapping the faults within the Southern Sierra Nevada, there had been several accounts of activity along the Kern Canyon Fault well into the Quaternary Era. Her research continued into 2010, which explicitly entailed the lines of evidence that overturn the proposition that the fault was inactive for more than 3.5 million years.