For my rendezvous, I drive hours outh of San Francisco, then turn down a private road where radio reception dwindles and the only traffic signs warn drivers to keep an eye out for cattle. Pretty much all I find when I arrive is a mud-splattered hole in the ground, but to hear Bill Ellsworth describe it, this spot is a field of dreams. "It's like we've been gazing at this game from a distance for decades," he says. "Now someone has given us front row seats. Our noses will be pushed up against the glass, at the heart of the action." The reason that Ellsworth can see so much in this unremarkable chunk of real estate is because he is a senior researcher at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. For him the action lies 3 kilometres underground, on a football field-sized patch of the San Andreas fault, where two pieces of the Earth's crusty skin have been scraping past each other for aeons. Ellsworth, his USGS colleague Stephen Hickman and Mark Zoback of Stanford University in California have the site earmarked for what could be the ultimate extreme sport: they will use an oil drilling rig to burrow to within metres of where earthquakes are born. Then they plan to set up an electronic network and watch the tremors go off again and again.
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