The fault was first identified in Northern California by UC Berkeley geology professor Andrew Lawson in 1895 and named by him after the '' Laguna de San Andreas '' , a small lake which lies in a linear valley formed by the fault just south of San Francisco . Eleven years later , Lawson discovered that the San Andreas Fault stretched southward into southern California after reviewing the effects of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake . Large-scale ( hundreds of miles ) lateral movement along the fault was first proposed in a 1953 paper by geologists Mason Hill and Thomas Dibblee . This idea , which was considered radical at the time , has since been vindicated by modern plate tectonics
1906 San Francisco earthquake
1906 San Francisco earthquake
San Andreas Fault