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Weird, Z-shaped faults could trigger a large earthquake on California's San Andreas Fault
Live Science ^ | 17 July 2020 | Laura Geggel

Posted on 07/20/2020 10:25:23 AM PDT by BenLurkin

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 even decades) as stress builds up and gets transferred from one fault to the next, said study co-author Ross Stein, a geophysicist and the founder and CEO of Temblor, Inc., a company that models and assesses earthquake risks.

The new analysis of this possible "earthquake chain reaction" suggests that another large San Andreas rumbler near Los Angeles is now 3.5 to 5 times more likely than scientists previously thought, thanks to the Ridgecrest quakes.

The Garlock Fault is relatively quiet; it hasn't released a significant earthquake in about 500 years. But if the Garlock Fault ruptures within about 30 miles (45 km) of its junction with the San Andreas Fault, it could raise the likelihood of a San Andreas quake to the southeast — the so-called Mojave section — by a factor of about 150, Stein and study co-author Shinji Toda, a professor of natural disaster research who specializes in seismology at Tohoku University in Japan, wrote on the Temblor blog.

"We thus estimate the net chance of a large San Andreas earthquake in the next 12 months to be 1.15%, or 1 chance in 87," they wrote in the post.

(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...


TOPICS: Science
KEYWORDS: california; earthquake; earthquakes; fault; faults; garlockfault; losangeles; mojave; quake; quakes; ridgecrestfault; rossstein; sanandreas; shinjitoda; temblor; zshaped
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To: Secret Agent Man

“murder hornets”

Ya, those too.


21 posted on 07/20/2020 12:16:34 PM PDT by READINABLUESTATE
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To: rlmorel
I used to be a “When will they slide off into the ocean” guy, but...that was all rhetoric, and I can’t even rhetoric it any more.

If we could only get it to slide off by voting district...

22 posted on 07/20/2020 1:36:49 PM PDT by JimRed (TERM LIMITS, NOW! Build the Wall Faster! TRUTH is the new HATE SPEECH.)
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To: JimRed

I just might “rhetoric” that...


23 posted on 07/20/2020 1:58:18 PM PDT by rlmorel ("Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies"- George Orwell)
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To: BenLurkin

...just before the election...


24 posted on 07/20/2020 2:56:18 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.)
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