San Andreas "Quake Swarm" Has Cali Residents Fearing The "Big One" Is Imminent

Yesterday morning a series of 10 earthquakes struck Monterey County, California along the San Andreas fault line and has Cali residents increasingly concerned that the "Big One" could be next.  The quakes, the biggest of which measured 4.6 on the Richter scale, hit near Salinas, California but were felt 90 miles away in San Francisco.  Per SF Gate:

A 4.6-magnitude earthquake rattled Monterey County on Monday and was felt more than 90 miles away in San Francisco, officials said.

 

The quake hit at 11:31 a.m. about 13 miles northeast of Gonzales, near Salinas, and was followed by nine smaller aftershocks, with the largest measuring magnitude 2.8, said Annemarie Baltay, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park.

 

There were no reports of injuries or damage.

 

Baltay said the quake occurred on the San Andreas Fault, close to an area where the Calaveras Fault branches off. The quake happened at a depth of about 4 miles.

While a seismologist for the US Geological Survey, Annemarie Baltay, dismissed the recent quakes as part of "normal seismic activity", the Director of the Southern California Earthquake Center offered a slightly different opinion to the LA Times last year:

“Any time there is significant seismic activity in the vicinity of the San Andreas fault, we seismologists get nervous,” said Thomas H. Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center, “because we recognize that the probability of having a large earthquake goes up.”

 

As seismic activity drops, the probability of having a large earthquake also decreases.

 

Experts said it’s important to understand that the chance of the swarm triggering a big one, while small, was real.

 

“When there’s significant seismicity in this area of the fault, we kind of wonder if it is somehow going to go active,” said Caltech seismologist Egill Hauksson. “So maybe one of those small earthquakes that’s happening in the neighborhood of the fault is going to trigger it, and set off the big event.”

Of course, Thomas Jordan is the same California Seismologist who raised some eyebrows last year when he proclaimed that the San Andreas fault is well overdue for a major quake. 

“The springs on the San Andreas system have been wound very, very tight. And the southern San Andreas fault, in particular, looks like it’s locked, loaded and ready to go,” Jordan said in the opening keynote talk.

 

Other sections of the San Andreas fault also are far overdue for a big quake. Further southeast of the Cajon Pass, such as in San Bernardino County, the fault has not moved substantially since an earthquake in 1812, and further southeast toward the Salton Sea, it has been relatively quiet since about 1680 to 1690.

 

Here’s the problem: Scientists have observed that based on the movement of tectonic plates, with the Pacific plate moving northwest of the North American plate, earthquakes should be relieving about 16 feet of accumulated plate movement every 100 years. Yet the San Andreas has not relieved stress that has been building up for more than a century.

Jordan went on to say that when the tension that has been building along the San Andreas fault is finally relieved, it could potentially produce a magnitude 8 earthquake. Here"s what a Magnitude 8 quake would look like...

Back in 2008, the U.S. Geological Survey concluded that just a magnitude 7.8 earthquake along the southern San Andreas fault would cause more than 1,800 deaths, 50,000 injuries and 200 billion dollars in damage...so lets hope that Jordan is wrong.

Scientists Warn That The Coming California Megaquake Could Plunge Large Portions Of The State Into The Ocean

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

Over the years, many people have been shown that someday a giant earthquake will cause significant portions of California to fall into the ocean. But up until now, most scientists have disputed the idea that this could ever actually happen. Well, now all of that has changed. According to a brand new study, a megaquake along the west coast “could plunge large parts of California into the sea almost instantly”. In fact, the researchers that conducted this study say that it is almost certain to happen eventually. Of course they probably don’t believe that such an event is imminent or else they would be moving out of the state like so many other people are.

When I came across news stories about this brand new study I was absolutely astounded. Here is a short excerpt from one of them…

The Big One may be overdue to hit California, but scientists near LA have found a new risk for the area during a major earthquake.

They claim that if a major tremor hits the area, it could plunge large parts of California into the sea almost instantly.

The discovery was made after studying the Newport-Inglewood fault, which has long been believed to be one of Southern California’s danger zones.

Could you imagine what such a catastrophe would do to our nation and how many lives would be lost if that were to happen today?

According to the study, a California megaquake would potentially cause some sections of southern California to suddenly drop by as much as 3 feet, and that could result in vast stretches of land “ending up at or below sea level”…

In total three quakes over the last 2,000 years on nearby faults made ground just outside Los Angeles city limits sink as much as 3ft.

Today that could result in the area ending up at or below sea level, said Cal State Fullerton professor Matt Kirby, who worked with the paper´s lead author, graduate student Robert Leeper.

Wow.

And we are not talking about something that would happen over a period of weeks or months. According to these scientists, it would be a “very rapid sinking”…

“It’s not just a gradual sinking. This is boom — it would drop. It’s very rapid sinking,” Robert Leeper, lead author of a new study published in Nature, carried out with the help of the US Geological Survey, told the LA Times.

So could a substantial portion of southern California someday actually slide into the ocean like we see in the movies?

The scientists that were involved in this study say that the answer is yes…

Cal State Fullerton professor Matt Kirby, who worked with the Leeper on the study, said the sinking would occur quickly and likely result in part of California being covered by the sea.

“It’s something that would happen relatively instantaneously,” Prof Kirby said. “Probably today if it happened, you would see seawater rushing in.”

Let us hope that we have as much time as possible before anything like this actually happens. But scientists are also telling us that a tremendous amount of seismic tension has built up in southern California, and that this tension could cause a major earthquake at any time. In fact, in my recent article about why people are moving out of California, I included a quote from an ABC Los Angeles story about how researchers are warning that a major earthquake in southern California is “way overdue”…

A recently published study reveals new evidence that a major earthquake is way overdue on a 100 mile stretch of the San Andreas Fault from the Antelope Valley to the Tejon Pass and beyond.

Researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey released the results of the years-long study warning a major earthquake could strike soon.

Today, more than 38 million people live in the state of California, and as a population density map of the state shows, much of the population is concentrated along the coastline…

So if large sections of the California coast did end up plunging into the ocean, what would the death toll be?

Would it be in the millions?

And what would such a disaster mean for the rest of the country?

The west coast of the United States sits along “the Ring of Fire”. Roughly encircling the Pacific Ocean, this vast seismic zone contains approximately 75 percent of the active volcanoes in the world and it produces more than 80 percent of all major earthquakes.

In other words, anyone that lives near the Ring of Fire would be foolish to assume that they are immune from massive natural disasters.

In 2011, a major earthquake along the Ring of Fire on the other side of the Pacific Ocean caused a massive tsunami to wash inland in Japan for many, many miles.

If such a thing were to happen in Los Angeles or San Francisco, the death and destruction would be on a scale that would be absolutely unimaginable.

When the big Hollywood film entitled “San Andreas” came out in 2015, a lot of people mocked the idea that the things portrayed in that film could ever happen in real life.

But now scientists are telling us that a megaquake could cause large portions of California to plunge into the ocean and that it is quite likely that this will actually happen someday.