"And so this area actually poses the largest seismic hazard in all of California because it could severely damage the Los Angeles metropolitan area."Ī plausible earthquake that begins at the Salton Sea and ruptures through Palm Springs, continuing to Los Angeles County, is known as the ShakeOut scenario. Hill, a doctoral candidate in geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and San Diego State who was lead author of the study. "Yet we know that this portion of the fault has accumulated enough tectonic strain to produce such an event," said Ryley G. For others, the gaps were probably as long as 280 years.īut it's been about three centuries-sometime between 17-since a temblor that was at least a magnitude 7 struck the southernmost section of the San Andreas. Some were probably separated by only a 40- or 50-year gap. In this southernmost section of the San Andreas, there have been seven major earthquakes between the 10th and 18th centuries. A section between Monterey County and San Bernardino County ruptured 166 years ago, and another portion ruptured in the great San Francisco earthquake 117 years ago. Other sections of the San Andreas have ruptured more recently. A drying Salton Sea may be helping delay the next Big One, but that could result in a more powerful quake when it does strike.Ī study published Wednesday in the journal Nature by scientists at San Diego State University and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego aimed to help explain why the southernmost tip of the San Andreas fault, close to the Mexican border, hasn't had an earthquake of a magnitude 7 or greater in about 300 years. The drought of earthquakes on the San Andreas fault will not last. A new study provides a possible answer-the drying Salton Sea, about 150 miles southeast of L.A., and the lack of sudden, major floodwaters funneling into it since it formed more than a century ago.īut one thing is certain.
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