An SDSU and Scripps study found that the Salton Sea may reduce seismicity as it contracts

San Diego –

The shrinking and drying of the Salton Sea has reduced pressure on the San Andreas fault, which could reduce the frequency and intensity of earthquakes in Southern California, according to research from San Diego State University and the University of San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography published Wednesday.

The study, published in the journal Nature, found that reducing pressure on the fault caused by much less water could delay the next “big fault.”

The San Andreas Fault is a roughly 800-mile-long fracture in Earth’s crust where the Pacific and North American tectonic plates meet. The two boards slowly slide apart from each other horizontally at an average rate of about two inches per year. The Pacific plate lies on the western side of the rift and moves roughly to the northwest, while the North American plate lies on the eastern side sloping to the southeast.

Over the past 1,000 years, major earthquakes emanating from the southern San Andreas fault, which extends roughly south from the San Bernardino Mountains to Bombay Beach in Imperial County, have coincided with periods when the basin carrying the Salton Sea filled with water to form prehistoric times. Lake Cahuilla – An area of ​​water six times the size of the current Salton Sea.

“One possible effect of reducing the stress on the fault is that it leaves the southern San Andreas fault closed and loaded,” SDSU geologist Matt Weingarten and one of the researchers on the paper told City News Service. “On the wrong side, we see major earthquakes about every 180 years, but it’s been 300 years since the last major seismic event. It seems to be related to the Colorado River that fills the Salton Basin.”

The researchers investigated this relationship with computer modeling and found that as the Salton Sea basin filled, the weight of Lake Cahuila flexed the surrounding crust and pushed its waters deeper into the Earth, each of which changed the forces acting on the rift in ways that could have helped trigger a massive explosion. Severe tearing and shaking.

The research, funded by the Southern California Earthquake Center, the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the US Geological Survey, suggests that the close relationship between massive seismic activity and the filling of the Salton Sea basin may also help explain why the southern portion is so turbulent. The long overdue San Andreas crack for the next major change.

The northern part of California’s San Andreas fault was triggered by the hugely destructive 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, but the southern part has been relatively quiet.

Yuri Fialko, study co-author and professor of geophysics at Scripps, described southern San Andreas as “10 months pregnant,” with a large tremor that could cause an estimated 1,800 deaths and $200 billion in damages if struck at magnitude 7.8, according to the institutions.

said Riley Hill, first author of the study and PhD candidate in Earthquake Geophysics joint SDSU-Scripps Science and Applied Geophysics PhD program. “It also means that there could be more stress built up along the fault as a result, and additional stress will be released at some point in the future.”

To study the relationship between the filling of the Salton Trough and seismic activity, the team created complex models that took five days to run the advanced SDSU supercomputer.

The research raises additional questions, such as how much human interaction with the Salton Sea might affect the fault’s seismic activity and how it might do so in the future. A committee has rejected a proposal to refill the Salton Sea with ocean water in 2022.

“Before anyone can do the engineering work required for these restoration projects, they have to know where the active faults are located, their movement history, the geotechnical properties of the deposits they’re building on, and so on,” Danny said. Brothers, a research geophysicist with the USGS and lead author of a related study out in 2022. “This study identifies where many of the faults in the sea are located and begins to build a seismic history for this area – all of which are likely to have implications of any kind. of the proposed Salton Sea restoration plan.

Fialco said the model developed to better understand southern San Andreas could also be applied to other places on Earth where there are large and abrupt changes in hydrological loads, such as reservoirs being filled and emptied.

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