The fault lies less than 5 miles from campus. Stands of live oak and gray pine dot the crumpled hillsides, shading the cattle from the midday heat as they doze and flick their tails at flies.
Wild turkeys scratch the dust, alert for the occasional sound of approaching pickup trucks.
Hunting those turkeys is a favorite pastime of the locals. Over the last 15 years, geophysicists planted several million dollars' worth of seismometers and other monitoring equipment on private ranches in the valley, making it one of the most closely watched spots on earth. If current funding negotiations are successful, Zoback says with an optimistic grin, drilling could begin as early as the fall of 2000. Zoback's ambitious project comes at the end of a fertile decade of quake-related research by Stanford scientists and engineers. Much of it was sparked by an infusion of grant money after Loma Prieta.