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There's a massive fault hidden under America's highest mountain — and we finally know how it formed

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Summary
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80% Informative

The Denali Fault is a strike-slip fault, a place where two chunks of continental crust slide past each other.

On Nov. 3, 2002 , the fault jolted, creating a magnitude 7.9 earthquake that knocked houseboats off their moorings more than 1,500 miles ( 2,414 kilometers ) away in Seattle .

A geoscientist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks , studied three sections of the fault.