[LibertarianLiz]

I'm sorry, but doesn't the "Ring of Fire" run down the West Coast of the United States; which I believe includes CA. And wasn't this gigantor quake which just hit Japan a product of that same "Ring of Fire"? Wouldn't that mean that CA is vulnerable to that same size quake? Just asking.

[americanophile]

Yes, but it’s a different kind of fault zone - strike-slip, which means it’s a transform plate boundary, where the plates grind past each other, not a a convergent plate boundary, where they smash into one another. Those seems to produce the most devastating earthquakes. The real story is up in the Puget Sound area where a very small plate is subducting under the North American one...it’s only a matter of time before they get one like Japan.

[EVO X]

Wouldn't that mean that CA is vulnerable to that same size quake? Just asking

Conventional scientific theory has the San Andreas fault generating a maximum of 8.0. There are scientists that think it can create larger ones.

The Cascadia Subduction zone fault off the coast of Oregon and Washington is capable of generating an earthquake and tsunami as large as the one in Japan according to scientists