The San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD) is one of three components of the Earthscope Project, funded by the National Science Foundation in conjunction with the USGS and NASA. The SAFOD site is located just north of the town of Parkfield, California. The SAFOD main hole was drilled to a depth of ~3.4 km in 2004 and 2005, crossing the San Andreas near a region of the fault where repeating Magnitude 2 earthquakes are generated.
A goal of this project is to install instruments to record data near the source of these earthquakes. In addition to the installation of these instruments, rock and fluid samples were continuously collected during the drilling process, and will also be used to analyze changes in geochemistry and mechanical properties around the fault zone. The project will lead to a better understanding of the processes that control the behavior of the San Andreas fault, and it is hoped that the development of instrumentation and analytic methods will help evaluate the possibility of earthquake prediction which is of primary importance for earthquake engineering.
The project is co-PIed by Bill Ellsworth and Steve Hickman of the USGS, and Stanford geophysics faculty member and alum Mark Zoback. Zoback's research in The School focuses on stress and crustal mechanics. His students are heavily engaged in on-going research in the geophysics Earthquake Group (particularly via SAFOD), and Global Climate and Energy Project.
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Read more about this topic: Stanford University School Of Earth Sciences
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