Report: Salton Sea affecting earthquake activity

The southern San Andreas fault hasn’t caused a major earthquake in 300 years, and San Diego researchers think the shrinking of the Salton Sea may be partly responsible.

A new research paper published in the current issue of the scientific journal Nature suggests that the ebb and flow of water in the desert region may be related to seismic activity there.

The Salton Sea was created in 1905 when an irrigation barrier erupted and flooded part of Imperial County with waters from the Colorado River. The canyon lies below sea level about 130 miles east of San Diego. California’s largest lake has been shrinking ever since.

This shrinkage is occurring more rapidly in recent years due to drought and reduced agricultural runoff.

Filling and emptying of this desert floor has occurred regularly over the past thousand years and dry and wet cycles influence the unstable geology of the region.

The San Diego State University researchers pointed to the geological record, which shows that a large lake may have formed there at least six times over the past 10 centuries.

One accident created Lake Cahuilla, a body of water containing 32 times the amount of water in the current Salton Sea.

The researchers found that water is heavy enough on its own to create seismic activity.

The huge lake has flexed the Earth’s crust – which is particularly thin in this area – and forced water into cracks underground. This essentially lubricates the fault, making it easier for large lacerations to occur.

“When the lake was really high, the pressure changes on the lake were high enough to cause an earthquake, but also potentially altering the timing of that earthquake, either speeding it up or slowing it down,” said Matt Weingarten, a researcher at San Diego State University. Co-authored the paper.

More than 5,000 earthquakes are measured in the region each year, although most are too small to feel.

The North American and Pacific tectonic plates rub against each other along the 800-mile-long San Andreas Fault. The northern part of the fault is responsible for the devastating San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. The southern tail runs alongside the Salton Sea before ending under the Desert Valley.

The Earth’s crust is also thin there, making Imperial County a prime place for harvesting geothermal energy.

The region was also delayed in a major seismic event.

“It’s a closed department right now,” said Riley Hill, lead author of the study and a graduate student at San Diego State University and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “And it’s been closed for 300 years. The last big rupture was in 1725. And over the last 1,000 years, we’ve had probably six or seven big events.”

The Great Rip usually occurs every 180 years.

Scientists don’t know why such a long seismic drought occurs, but a smaller lake could extend that extent.

However, they also worry that pressure building along the fault could mean the next big rupture could be massive.

“It means that tectonic stress has built up in that time period,” Hill said. “Which, instead of relieving that stress in a series of events that were shorter in time. You’re accumulating a lot of stress.”

The next major earthquake to explode in the region is likely to be the Big One.

A powerful earthquake is likely to reverberate through this valley in the Los Angeles Basin with the potential to cause billions of dollars in property damage while endangering lives.

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