Toasted Dolphin

Scientists have discovered that human-created changes effecting the Salton Sea appear to be the reason why California's massive "Big One" earthquake is more than 100 years overdue and building up for the greatest disaster ever to hit Los Angeles and Southern California. Researchers found that strands of the San Andreas Fault under the 45-mile long rift lake have have generated at least five 7.0 or larger quakes about every 180 years. This ended in the early 20th century when authorities stopped massive amounts of Colorado River water from periodically flooding the into this sub-sea level desert basin. Such floods used to regularly trigger major quakes and relieve building seismic pressure but the last big earthquake on the southern San Andreas was about 325 years ago. Dangerous new fault branches that could trigger a 7.8 quake have recently been discovered under the Salton Sea.

A mega earthquake that would rattle almost the entire length of California was long thought impossible, but new research suggests that a statewide quake could actually occur. A new study published in the online version of Nature says certain sections of California’s notorious San Andreas fault that were once believed to act as buffers could actually rupture, unzipping the state some 450 miles, from San Diego to San Francisco.

The 9.0-magnitude earthquake that rocked Japan in 2011, killing thousands of people and badly damaging the Fukushima nuclear power plant, was caused by a snap in a section of the fault that scientists had also believed to be stable, the study said. Such segments are called “creeping,” because they slip slowly and steadily, releasing pressure as tectonic plates shift in the Earth.

But the researchers said computer modeling suggests a creeping segment of the San Andreas in central California has the potential to behave like locked segments, which build up stress over time and then rupture.

"The thinking has been that an earthquake could either occur on the southern San Andreas fault or on the northern San Andreas fault — that the creeping segment is separating it into two halves," an author of the study, geophysicist Nadia Lapusta, told the Los Angles Times.

"But this study shows that if an earthquake penetrates that creeping area in a certain way, it could rupture through it."


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