Earthquakes

We're Claire and Nisha, and we live in a place where earthquakes are NOT science fiction! We live in San Francisco, where you can really feel the earth move under your feet. The last big quake here was in 1989, before we were born. We wondered if we could learn about how the earth moves in an earthquake by looking around the city. Our question: How does the earth move when there's an earthquake?

How would you investigate this question?
Even if you don't live near an earthquake fault zone, can you come up with a clever way to investigate Claire and Nisha's question? Could you make a model out of clay, and discover an answer that way? Maybe you can use aerial photos you find on the Internet to observe a fault zone from above, without traveling there. Describe your investigation in your notebook and discuss it with you teacher, or go to Earthquakes to learn what Claire and Nisha discovered.