Fault evidence near the Salton Sea shows a huge quake is overdue on the San Andreas Fault, scientists say.
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-- The southern end of the San Andreas Fault may be overdue for a large earthquake that could cause heavy damage to the Los Angeles area, scientists have concluded after studying a record of ancient quakes and flooding around the seismically active region of the Salton Sea.
The researchers report finding evidence of many small past quakes that have ruptured along small "stepover" faults which run at right angles to the southern end of the San Andreas. The underground stresses those small quakes have built up could trigger a much bigger one in the future on the dominant San Andreas, they say.
A report from a group at the U.S. Geological Survey in Woods Hole, Mass., the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego and the Nevada Seismological Laboratory in Reno suggests that a major temblor in the Salton Sea region could reach a magnitude greater than 7 - significantly larger than the 6.9-magnitude Loma Prieta quake of 1989 in the Bay Area.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/02/BA7J1K3LP8.DTL#ixzz1R4PQCX55
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