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Where can we find out where all the earthquake vaults are?

Public Comments

1. We can't. There are thousands of faults. Most of them are associated with plate boundaries. Some of them are large, intraplate faults, like the New Madrid Fault Zone near St. Louis. The Northeastern US is fractured with dozens of very quiet faults that will never do anything bad, but they exist, mostly unknown to those of New England. In the west, there are normal, vertical, and thrust faults that can go essentially unseen until they change the vertical topography. That's just in the United States. There are hundreds of other fault that we can't see, and probably will never see, but they're there. Extrapolate this to the entire world and you have at least tens of thousands of faults. Maybe if you did some very detailed and comprehensive geophysical seismic reflection/tomogrpahy you could find "all the faults." But that would be wildly unrealistic. It's just going to have to be one of those things that remain a mystery.