The recent California earthquakes may have made a major earthquake in San Andreas

In southern California, the landscape is divided into a massive Z shape. The upper arm is made up of a zigzag chain of cracks that were responsible for the earthquakes that rocked the city of Ridgecrest last year. The diagonal is an old mistake called Garlock that extends to the west. Along the bottom sits the great San Andreas.

Earthquakes along this long rift, which stretches more than 800 miles across California, is a worry looming – a new study suggests that next year, a major earthquake near the bustling city of Los Angeles could be three to five times more likely. Than previously thought. The research, published in the Bulletin of the American Seismic Society, found that the Ridgecrest 2019 earthquakes made a future earthquake along the nearby Jarlock mistake more likely. If a large enough earthquake strikes Garlock, it may cause the San Andreas error as well – a series of events that researchers estimate the probability of occurring in the following year at 87 out of 1.

However, the overall probability of such an event remains low. The research team estimates that there is a 2.3 percent chance of a 7.7 magnitude earthquake in the Garlock error next year, and a 1.15 percent chance of a similar earthquake hitting San Andreas.

The study’s co-author Ross Stein, CEO of Temblor, Inc. says , A company that assesses risks from hazards such as earthquakes: “So the sky is not falling.” “But it is much higher in our opinion than it would have been if the Ridgecrest earthquake had not occurred.”

Estimating earthquake probability is difficult. Scientists have increasingly realized that the deep mistakes they generate are intricate networks of cracks and rifts. “They are fractal. They are vulgar. Stein says, they have bends and breaks.

Mistakes can also interact: movement along one may increase pressure on another, sparking a series of earthquakes, “like the effect of dominoes,” says Alessandro Verdicchia, a geologist at McGill University who was not part of the study. The new paradigm is the latest attempt to assess the likelihood of this potential killer scenario.

How to fall dominoes

The San Andreas fault represents the boundary as the North American tectonic plate and the Pacific plate grind adjacent. As the Pacific plate rolls along a northwestern path, pressure builds up to break ground, sending the surface as it rolls into the earthquake.

There were many earthquakes in California during the last century, but the last time a major earthquake occurred along San Andreas itself was in 1906, when a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck about 300 miles of error, and only buildings across San Francisco killed more than 3,000 people . It was the deadliest earthquake in the history of the United States.

The new study indicates that Ridgecrest earthquakes increased the chances of another major earthquake, this time in southern California.

The 2019 event was a double blow, with a magnitude of 6.4 and then 7.1 earthquakes that hit one day separately. The movement of these earthquakes distorted the surrounding landscape, putting pressure on nearby malfunctions like Garlock.

To estimate this change in pressure, Stein and co-author Shinji Toda of Tohoku University in Japan created a motion-based model along defects during the Ridgecrest earthquakes. Stein says they also included data from a group of previous earthquakes to visualize the defect as a region of fractures.

The model estimates that in the year following Ridgecrest, there was an 8 percent chance of a 7.7-strong event along Jarlock. Although this was not achieved, the work indicates that there is still a greater risk than previously recognized. Next year, the chance of such an earthquake remains at 2.3 percent, about 100 times the size of previous models.

An earthquake large enough along Garlock – with a magnitude of 7.5 or greater, according to researchers’ calculations – could spark an earthquake along San Andreas going south toward Los Angeles.

“The fact that it is higher is interesting and it might motivate us to look at it more closely,” says John Vidal, a geophysicist at the University of Southern California who has not been involved in the study, referring to the estimated probability of a major earthquake. But he says that many uncertainties remain, and the time period that carries a greater risk of Garlock rupture has already passed, so the new model “does not necessarily mean we need to be more afraid than we would have done.”

Nevertheless, the new work is a good reminder that all residents living in the earthquake country need to be prepared, says Stein. If a large earthquake strikes Jarlock’s fault, it may take weeks, months, or more before San Andreas also slides – if at all. But earthquakes in this region at some point in the future are inevitable. (Learn more about earthquake safety and how to prepare.)

“The creak of assumptions creaks”

All models, including the most recent ones, make simplistic assumptions about our surprisingly complex planet. For example, the new model does not take into account the complexities of fluid reactions, which can change error pressures over long periods of time, says Pablo Gonzalez, a geophysicist at the University of Liverpool in England and part of the Spanish National Research Council that was not part of the study.

The model also assumes that the Earth is uniform in composition. But the movement along Garlock’s fault over millions of years has compensated the Earth by about 40 miles, which means that rocks in the north differ from those in the south, Gonzales says.

One of the special challenges with all earthquake projections is that researchers don’t know how much extra pressure is needed to cause the error to break, says Chris Goldwinger, an earthquake geologist at Oregon State University, who was not part of the new study.

“When you get to San Andreas, you’re about to make long assumptions,” says Goldwinger. “I still sleep well in Los Angeles tonight – or as I would have otherwise.”

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