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* The hole may be leaking 'fault lubricant' that reduces stress on two plates * The fault could unleash a magnitude-9 earthquake in the Pacific Northwest * READ MORE: Extra layer of plate tectonics could be causing tremors in Pacific ============================================================= Scientists fear a hole in a 600-mile-long fault line in the Pacific could trigger a catastrophic earthquake that would decimate cities along the northwestern US. The hole spewing hot liquid sits 50 miles off the shoreline of Oregon, on the boundary of the dipping fault known as Cascadia Subduction Zone, which spans from Northern California into Canada. This geological...

Known as the Palos Verdes fault zone, the system runs deep beneath the Palos Verdes Peninsula. It previously was thought to be a segmented network of smaller faults, but a closer look by scientists at Harvard University suggests it’s a system of interconnected, closely spaced planar fractures stretching from the Santa Monica Bay to the waters off Dana Point. The analysis determined the fault system, which runs beneath numerous neighborhoods as well as the ports of Long Beach and L.A., has a much larger surface area that could rupture in the same seismic event, making it capable of a far...

Monday’s largest quake hit at about 2:08 p.m. at the south tip of the sea, about 8 miles northwest of Calipatria and 25 miles north of El Centro, USGS said. People reported feeling strong shaking at the epicenter and weak movement as far away as San Diego, Cathedral City and El Centro. Swarms are common in the Imperial Valley, and past swarms in the area have stayed active for about a week on average. Those include a 1981 swarm around Westmorland that included a 5.8 magnitude quake, and a 2012 swarm near Brawley that included a magnitude 5.4 temblor. The...

The San Andreas Fault is part of a giant "Z" of faults; the top of the "Z" consists of the Ridgecrest Fault, the middle is the Garlock Fault and the bottom is the southern part of the famous San Andreas. If the "top-of-the-Z" Ridgecrest Fault were to have a really big earthquake (at least a magnitude 7.5), that could trigger an earthquake on the "middle-of-the-Z" Garlock Fault, which, in turn, could cause a massive earthquake along the "bottom-of-the-Z" San Andreas, a new study finds. These successive earthquakes wouldn't necessarily happen all at once, but over a period of time (perhaps...

The study, published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America on Monday, says there is now a 2.3% chance of an earthquake of magnitude 7.5 or greater in the next 12 months on a section of the 160-mile-long Garlock fault, which runs along the northern edge of the Mojave Desert. That increased likelihood, in turn, would cause there to be a 1.15% chance of a large earthquake on the San Andreas fault in the next year.

Tuesday’s quake occurred along a section that is notable for not having had dramatically large earthquakes in the modern historical record. Keith Knudsen, USGS geologist and deputy director of the agency’s Earthquake Science Center, called Tuesday’s quake “a garden variety San Andreas event” in this section. “This is the 10th earthquake larger than magnitude 4 in the last 20 years in this area” within a radius of about six miles from Tuesday’s epicenter, Knudsen said. The stretches of San Andreas north and south of the creeping section have acted very differently in the modern historical period, rupturing in the state’s...

NASA has not confirmed why one of their craft was in the area, but online viewers have now spotted that its flight path appeared to show it zig-zagging over the infamous San Andreas Fault. Renowned conspiracy theorist Tyler Glockner… “A registered NASA aircraft was noticed doing zig-zag flying patterns near and over the San Andreas fault line,” he said.” “It’s almost as if it is scanning the ground as if to try and get more data about what is happening underneath. Tyler wasn’t the only person to have linked the sighting of the NASA craft to the Fault. News conspiracy...

It is theoretically possible, though there's no known link between the two fault systems, geophysicists say. And because there's still so much to learn about the complicated fault system that ruptured, it's difficult to say whether the San Andreas Fault took on additional stress from the recent quakes, they say. The magnitude-7.1 quake on July 5 ruptured a known portion of the Little Lake Fault zone, while the magnitude-6.4 quake that hit the prior day ruptured a previously unmapped region of the fault zone, Glenn Biasi, a geophysicist with the USGS in Pasadena, California, told Live Science in an email....

A new analysis of thousands of very small earthquakes that have occurred in the San Bernardino basin near the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults suggests that the unusual deformation of some—they move in a different way than expected—may be due to "deep creep" 10 km below the Earth's surface... ... Michele Cooke say the enigmatic behavior is seen in about one third of the hundreds of tiny quakes recorded during the lull between big damaging quakes, and their possible significance had not been appreciated until now. ... Over the past 36 years... seismic stations have recorded the style of...

FULL TITLE: Is California about to be hit by the 'Big One'? Fears of a massive earthquake rise after 134 mini-tremors rattle the San Andreas fault in just one week Fresh fears have been raised that a huge earthquake is about to hit California after a swarm of recent tremors. In the last week 134 earthquakes have hammered a three-mile stretch around Monterey County on the San Andreas fault. Of those earthquakes, 17 were stronger than 2.5 magnitude and six of them were stronger than 3.0, with more tremors expected in the coming weeks, experts warn. It follows fears raised...

It’s 102 degrees, just north of Palm Springs. White wind turbines, two stories high, dot the desert landscape all of the way to the base of snowcapped mountains in the distance. Seismologist and earthquake expert Lucy Jones is standing on a small hill looking south, towards California’s most consequential fault: the San Andreas. It runs nearly the length of the state, from the Salton Sea to near Mendocino. From where we’re standing, the only evidence of the fault are slight indentations in the earth, snaking through the landscape. There are rocks and soil that’ve been moved by years of tectonic...

The probability of a magnitude-7 earthquake in Southern California briefly increased as much as 50-fold earlier this week, but has since been dropping back to normal, according to the U.S. Geological Survey and other quake experts. What changed things was a cluster of small quakes that began Monday near the southern end of the San Andreas fault. Seismologists believe that quake activity on one fault can lead to increased stresses on another, said Rob Graves, research seismologist based in the Pasadena USGS office. The cluster was epicentered beneath the Salton Sea, near Bombay Beach, within a handful of miles of...

The top diagram shows the lobes of movement, uplift in red and subsidence in blue, found using GPS data, while the botom diagram shows the lobes predicted by an earthquake simulation model. Image by University of Hawaii, Manoa =============================================================================================== HONOLULU, June 20 (UPI) -- Analysis of GPS data has revealed new areas of motion around the San Andreas Fault System. Using data collected by the EarthScope Plate Boundary Observatory's GPS array, researchers identified 125-mile-wide "lobes" of uplift and subsidence. Over the last several years, the lobes, which straddle the fault line, have hosted a few millimeters of annual movement. Computer...

The questions were coming fast and frantic: How strong was the earthquake? Was it on the San Andreas? Is the Big One coming? A massive temblor had struck near Joshua Tree shortly before 10 p.m., causing buildings to sway all the way to Las Vegas. As the public braced for more shaking, the media flocked to Caltech that night in 1992. One woman seemed to have all the answers. It was a magnitude 6.1, explained U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Lucy Jones, and the odds of a larger quake in the next three days stood at 15%. She shifted her weight...

Sanden Totten October 20 Angelenos live under constant threat of a major earthquake, but a controversial new study from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory puts a number on that threat. The scientific paper claims there is a 99.9 percent chance of an earthquake between magnitude 5 and 6.3 in less than three years. The study was published earlier this month by the American Geophysical Union's Earth and Space Science journal. The bold claim has taken many in the seismic community by surprise. Lead author, Andrea Donnellan of JPL, said this study used GPS and airborne radar data to look at land...

PASADENA (CBSLA.com) — If scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena are correct, a moderately-sized earthquake is expected within the next two-and-a-half years. JPL experts predict a possible 5.0 magnitude quake in Los Angeles, but say it very well could be stronger. JPL geophysicist Dr. Andrea Donnellan, along with seven other scientists, has been using radar and GPS to measure Southern California’s chances for a sizable earthquake, and has made a sobering hypothesis about another big one. “When the La Habra earthquake happened, it was relieving some of that stress, and it actually shook some of the upper sediments...

The 24-minute-long earthquake prophecy video, which has now been watched by over half-a-million people, predicts a massive 9.8 earthquake will hit California at 4pm local time on 28 May. The clip published by Frank Hoogerbeets, the founder and president of Ditrianum Media, claims he was able to assess the 'horrific' event using a computer program called Solar System Scope. The Huffington Post UK citing Hoogerbeets noted that his theory was based on the calculation that the 9.8 quake will strike when "no less than five planetary alignments will converge with the Earth." He claims that even Nostradamus, the famous French...

Admit it, there's nothing more fun than sitting in a dark theatre, munching on a bucket of buttery popcorn, and watching the Earth get demolished. In the latest round of catastrophic flicks, California is destroyed as the famous San Andreas Fault unleashes unimaginable (and unrealistic) devastation across the state. The new film, San Andreas, depicts the rupture of an unknown fault near the Hoover Dam in Nevada, which gets the destructive ball rolling by setting off powerful earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault. And although earthquakes are nothing new to Californians, and pose serious threats along the famous fault, Hollywood...

U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Susan Hough accompanied The Associated Press to an advance screening of the film. Despite the implausible plot, she said the San Andreas will indeed break again, and without warning. "We are at some point going to face a big earthquake," she said. The San Andreas is notorious for producing big ones, but a magnitude-9 or larger is virtually impossible because the fault is not long or deep enough, Hough noted. The most powerful temblors in recorded history have struck along offshore subduction zones where one massive tectonic plate dives beneath another. The 1960 magnitude-9.5 quake off...

For decades, scientists have assumed the central portion of California’s San Andreas fault acts as a barrier that prevents a big quake in the southern part of the state from spreading to the north, and vice versa. As a result, a mega-quake that could be felt from San Diego to San Francisco was widely considered impossible. But that key fault segment might not serve as a barrier in all cases, researchers wrote Wednesday in the online edition of the journal Nature. Using a combination of laboratory measurements and computer simulations, the two scientists showed how so-called creeping segments in a...