Walker Lane
Geologic trough in the western United States
title: "Walker Lane" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["geologic-provinces-of-california", "miocene-california", "owens-valley", "pliocene-california", "quaternary-california", "quaternary-nevada", "seismic-faults-of-california", "seismic-faults-of-nevada", "geology-of-alpine-county,-california"] description: "Geologic trough in the western United States" topic_path: "philosophy" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Lane" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0
::summary Geologic trough in the western United States ::
::data[format=table title="Infobox landform"]
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| other_name | Walker Lane Deformation Belt |
| type | Trough |
| location | California, Nevada |
| elevation_ft | |
| surface_elevation_ft | |
| length | 500 mi |
| :: |
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The Walker Lane is a geologic trough roughly aligned with the California/Nevada border southward to where Death Valley 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 Warm Springs Valley Fault, and the Pyramid Lake Fault Zone However, it's now known that the Mendocino Fault terminates at the Mendocino triple junction offshore in the Pacific and that the observed shear zone is simply the edge of the Modoc Plateau and its ancient basalt flows.-- 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 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. 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 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.
References
References
- "Walker Lane". United States Geological Survey.
- "Active Deformation of the Walker Lane Belt". University of Arizona Department of Geosciences.
- Pease, Robert W.. (1965). "Modoc County; University of California Publications in Geography, Volume 17". University of California Press.
- {{Cite Q. Q70050019. Guest, Bernard
- {{cite Q. Q96749837. Wesnousky, Steven
- {{Cite Q. Q58457938. Faulds, James E.
- Geoff Manaugh. (May 2019). "Nevada by the sea".
- {{Cite Q. Q29999790. Oldow, J.S.
- {{Cite Q. Q56874549. Unruh, Jeffrey
- {{Cite Q. Q96777558. Dokka, R.K.
- (2008). "Field Guide to Plutons, Volcanoes, Faults, Reefs, Dinosaurs, and Possible Glaciation in Selected Areas of Arizona, California, and Nevada". [[Geological Society of America]].
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