Stanford Stories XII - Earthquakes, Tunitas Creek and Berkeley

Have you ever heard of the “ring of fire”? Of course, I am not referring to the song from Johnny Cash, but the region around most of the Pacific Ocean where most of the volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occur. The Bay Area is part of that ring and the famous San Andreas Fault is located only a few miles from the Stanford campus. This Tuesday at 11:42AM PDT, we had a small 5.1 magnitude earthquake with the epicenter close to San Jose, which is ca 40 km away from Stanford. Fortunately, there didn’t seem to be any physical damage and, frankly, I almost did not notice it. The ground in our lab was slightly trembling for a few seconds, but it felt more like one of our lab mates stomping on the ground or a heavy truck passing by on an old cobblestone road - in the end nothing to worry about. The slightly more scary thing is that the chances of having a bigger earthquake around magnitude 7 before 2032 is pretty high (around 70%).

This Saturday, I finally made my long planned 75 km bike trip to the Pacific Ocean including two longer climbs (Kings Mountain and Tunitas Creek Road) accounting for 1350 m of elevation in total. At the end of the day my legs were pretty tired, but now I am super proud that I can say “I went to the Pacific Ocean by bike”. Definitely, one of the best bike rides have done so far.

On Sunday, we went on yet another wonderful hike into the hills around wildcat canyon, close to Berkeley on the north side of the Bay. On our way back, we stopped at Berkeley to have ice cream and to see the campus of the University of California which, to my mind, looks even better than the Stanford campus.