Across the valley is a huge whitewash “L” on a rock above the fault scar of the Humboldt Range. We go into Sturgeon’s Log Cabin restaurant and sit down for coffee against a backdrop of rolling cherries, watermelons, and bells. A mountain lion in a glass case. Six feet to the tip of the tail. Shot by Daniel (Bill) Milich, in the Tobin Range. I hand Deffe yes the Exxon map and ask him to sketch in for me the opening of the new seaway, the spreading center as he sees it coming. “Of course, all the valleys in the Great Basin are to a greater or lesser extent competing,” he says. “But I’d put it where I said-right here.” With a pencil he begins to rough in a double line, a swath, about fifteen miles wide. He sketches it through the axis of Death Valley and up into Nevada, and then north by northwest through Basalt and Coaldale before bending due north through Walker Lake, Fallon, and Lovelock. “The spreading center would connect with a transform fault coming in from Cape Mendocino,” he adds, and he sketches such a line from the California coast to a point a little north of flexplek huren rotterdam Lovelock. He is sketching the creation of a crustal plate, and he seems confident of that edge, for the Mendocino transform fault-the Mendocino trend-is in place now, ready to go. He is less certain about the southern edge of the new plate, because he has two choices. The Garlock Fault runs east-west just above Los Angeles, and that could become a side of the new plate; or the spreading center could continue south through the Mojave Desert and the Salton Sea to meet the Pacific Plate in the Gulf of California. “The Mojave sits in there with discontinued basin-andrange faulting,” Deffeyes says, almost to himself, a substitute for whistling, as he sketches in the alternative lines. “There has to flexplek huren almere be a transform fault at the south end of the live, expanding rift. The sea has got to get through somewhere.” Now he places his hands on the map so that they frame the Garlock and Mendocino faults and hold between them a large piece of California-from Bakersfield to Redding, roughly, and including San Francisco, Sacramento, and Fresno-not to mention the whole of the High Sierra, Reno, and ten million acres of Nevada. “You create a California Plate,” he says. “And the only question is: Is it this size, or the larger one? How much goes out to sea?” British Columbia is to his left and Mexico is to his right, beside his coffee cup on the oak Formica. The coast is against his belly. He moves his hands as if to pull all of central California out to sea.