California is bracing for a horrific earthquake, geological research finds

There is no fault on our part

Southern California is home to two major fault lines, the San Andreas and San Jacinto, where large tectonic plates collide with each other, sometimes causing violent earthquakes.

While smaller earthquakes are not uncommon in the region, stronger quakes can be devastating. For example, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which occurred along the San Andreas Fault, became the deadliest incident of its kind in U.S. history, killing an estimated 3,000 people while destroying more than 80 percent of the Bay Area city.

Of course, we are better prepared now than we were more than 100 years ago, thanks in large part to sophisticated seismic building codes and regulations designed to protect human life. But that doesn’t mean a particularly strong earthquake wouldn’t be devastating.

And the time has come. According to a new study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, cumulative pressures in California’s crust are higher today than at any time in the past 1,000 years, raising concerns about the potential for a massive rupture in the Los Angeles area.

The research could help scientists better understand the specific conditions that precede large earthquakes, giving us a clearer picture of the range of potentially devastating scenarios we need to be prepared for. However, predicting when these events will occur remains next to impossible, despite scientists’ best efforts.

The densely populated Los Angeles area is home to the Cajon Corridor, a “critical fault junction,” meaning a large earthquake can cross from one fault line to another. The international team led by Liliane Burkhard, a geoscience researcher at the University of Bern, has modeled the 1,000-year history of earthquakes along these fault systems. They found that tectonic stresses, measured in force per unit area, have been building since the last 7.9 magnitude earthquake that shook the Los Angeles area in 1857, reaching and exceeding the highest levels over the past millennium.

The team’s model “tracks how each earthquake changes stress on adjacent fault segments, how stress builds during quiet periods between events, and how deep layers of the crust slowly relax after large ruptures,” Burkhard explained in a statement. “These simulations allow us to understand how stresses build up in a fault system over centuries.”

“By running the history of earthquakes in Southern California as a simulation, we can estimate how stressed the fault system is already today,” she added.

The team coined a new term for the Cajon Corridor, calling it “seismic gate” that controls whether the main seismic activity is limited to a single fault or can cross over to an adjacent fault as well. The team determined that the 1857 earthquake was an example of the former, while the 1812 event was an example of the latter, as both fault systems were ruptured.

Burkhart points out that the dynamics between current stress levels “is approaching the range we associate with major fractures crossing both faults simultaneously — a scenario with much greater consequences for the region.”

It’s a crucial result, especially given how densely populated the area near Cajon Pass is. It is also home to important road, rail and energy infrastructure.

“The question of when and how the next large earthquake will occur in this region is one of the most pressing problems in applied geoscience,” Burkhard concluded. “Our results provide a clearer physics-based picture of the current stress state of a fault system, and the framework we developed applies not only to California, but also to other complex fault intersections around the world.”

But rather than providing a “prediction” of when such a “major event” might occur – which is still very difficult – Burkhard emphasized that her research instead provides “a clearer picture of the range of scenarios we need to be prepared for.”

More on earthquakes: Google has been quietly detecting earthquakes by sensing rumbles in Android phones for years

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