Janan Fancher, age 10, of Huntington Beach, California, for her question:

Are earthquakes really moving California farther north?

California's San Andreas fault is very restless and very famous. Its many shakes and shudders have given scientists a chance to study it in great detail. After each quake they measure and mark the ground in all directions and check changes by the earth's lines of latitude and longitude. With all this evidence, plus a lot more, they have a fairly clear picture of the general pattern. It seems that this unrest includes many huge blocks of the earth's crust, some of them many hundreds of miles long or wide. And the unrest seems to be shifting them around in a certain pattern.

The famous fault line runs north and south through California. The land on the side next to the sea appears to be inching its way northward. We think this is so because every time we get a major earthquake, it shifts the crust on the west side of the fault line a little farther north. Of course, the changes are very slight and it takes experts to measure them. But seismologists say this may go on and on into the future. In a million years or so, Costa Mesa might be pushed as far north as San Francisco.