Country's Geologists and mothers put aside past animosities and thank Johnson and Johnson!
The same soft powder used to prevent painful chafing between the thighs of marathoners, on babies' bottoms and in new hiking boots may also be easing friction along the San Andreas fault.
Geologists at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park discovered talc, the softest known natural mineral, in a two-mile-deep hole drilled into the fault near Parkfield in Central California.
The discovery could explain one of the fault's most puzzling features — a 100-mile long zone that slowly creeps along rather than sticking for years and then slipping suddenly as other sections of the fault do.
The research by USGS geologists Diane Moore and Michael Rymer, which appears today in the journal Nature, is part of a project called the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth, which has been drilling into the fault near Parkfield for four years with the aim of better understanding what causes earthquakes.
To read story, click
here
To see Geologist & actual baby, Michael Rymer, click
here
To see a photo of baby powder, click
here