Walker Lane

Walker Lane
Walker Lane Deformation Belt
geologic region
Parts	Faults: Honey Lake, Pyramid Lake, Benton Springs, Furnace Creek, Death Valley, Petrified Springs
Location	California, Nevada
Length	500 mi (805 km), NNW-SSE
Biome	Central Basin and Range ecoregion

The Walker Lane is a geologic trough roughly aligned with the California/Nevada border southward to where Death Valley intersects the Garlock Fault, a major left lateral, or sinistral, strike-slip fault. The north-northwest end of the Walker Lane is between Pyramid Lake in Nevada and California's Lassen Peak where the Honey Lake Fault Zone meets the transverse tectonic zone forming the southern boundary of the Modoc Plateau and Columbia Plateau provinces. The Walker Lane takes up 15 to 25 percent of the boundary motion between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate, the other 75 percent being taken up by the San Andreas Fault system to the west. The Walker Lane may represent an incipient major transform fault zone which could replace the San Andreas as the plate boundary in the future.

The Walker Lane deformation belt accommodates nearly 12 mm/yr of dextral shear between the Sierra Nevada-Great Valley Block and North America. The belt is characterized by the northwest-striking trans-current faults and co-evolutionary dip-slip faults formed as result of a spatially segregated displacement field.

The eastern California shear zone is the portion of the Walker Lane that extends south from Owens Valley, and continues across and south of the Garlock Fault, across the Mojave Desert to the San Andreas Fault.

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