The Walker Lane is a geologic trough roughly aligned with the

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

Nevada Nevada ( ; ) is a landlocked state in the Western United States. It borders Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast, and Utah to the east. Nevada is the seventh-most extensive, th ...

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. It is thought to be the Highest temperature recorded on Earth, hottest place on Earth during summer. Death Valley's Badwat ...

intersects the Garlock Fault, a major left lateral, or sinistral, strike-slip fault. The north-northwest end of the Walker Lane is between Pyramid Lake in Nevada and California's Lassen Peak where the

Honey Lake Fault Zone The Honey Lake Fault Zone is a right lateral-moving (dextral) Fault (geology), geologic fault extending through northwestern Nevada and northeastern California. It is considered an integral part of the Walker Lane. A zone of disturbed landforms ...

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

Columbia Plateau The Columbia Plateau is an important geology, geologic and geography, geographic region that lies across parts of the U.S. states of Washington (state), Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. It is a wide flood basalt plateau between the Cascade Range a ...

provinces. The Walker Lane takes up 15 to 25 percent of the boundary motion between the Pacific plate and the North American plate, the other 75 percent being taken up by the San Andreas Fault system to the west. The Walker Lane may represent an incipient major

transform fault A transform fault or transform boundary, is a fault (geology), fault along a plate boundary where the motion (physics), motion is predominantly Horizontal plane, horizontal. It ends abruptly where it connects to another plate boundary, either an ...

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 between the Sierra Nevada–Great Valley Block and

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere, Northern and Western Hemisphere, Western hemispheres. North America is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South Ameri ...

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

Mojave Desert The Mojave Desert (; ; ) is a desert in the rain shadow of the southern Sierra Nevada mountains and Transverse Ranges in the Southwestern United States. Named for the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, indigenous Mohave people, it is located pr ...

to the San Andreas Fault. Several 7+ earthquakes have occurred along the eastern California shear zone, including the 1992 Landers earthquake, 1999 Hector Mine earthquake, the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes sequence, as well as the powerful 1872 Owens Valley earthquake in the Owens Valley.

Eastern California shear zone

References

Further reading