Any of these subtle features could represent areas where otherwise hidden earthquake faults allow life-giving water, or less benign natural gas, to seep to the surface. And in a new study of upstate New York released earlier this month, the University of Buffalo's Jacobi and others have combined Landsat data with airborne and ground-based information to uncover what appears to be more than 50 previously unknown fault systems, each with myriad small branches. Yellow, green, dark blue and red lines show suspected fracture systems near the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. Jacobi and colleague John Fountain, along with a host of students, studied a small, remote portion of a long, flat plateau that stretches from Ohio to upstate New York and into Canada. From the ground, the plateau appears relatively featureless.
Geologists call it pancake geology.
And what we're suggesting is that there are more faults than we suspected. It is not known whether any of the faults are active. High earthquake activity occurs in places where plates of Earth's crust collide, as in California and Japan. High, steep mountain ranges are evidence of the young and violent process. The eastern United States, on the other hand, sits in the middle of a continental plate, where less frequent movement indicates a mature process, manifested with less drama in the mountain ranges.