In July 2019, a series of earthquakes — including two major shocks of magnitude 6.4 and 7.1 — struck near Ridgecrest, California, between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. For local residents, it was a violent interruption to the Fourth of July holiday. For seismologists, it was a rare opportunity to study how earthquakes damage the Earth’s crust.
The San Andreas and San Jacinto faults have ruptured simultaneously at least three times in the past 2,000 years, most recently in 1812, according to a new study by geologists at the University of California, Davis, and San Diego State University. The work was published Dec. 7 in the journal Geology.
A spate of major earthquakes on small faults could overturn traditional views about how earthquakes start, according to a study from researchers at the Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación Superior in Ensenada, Mexico, and the University of California, Davis.
The magnitude 6 earthquake that shook the Napa Valley in August was the strongest the region had felt in more than 20 years. But the next earthquake in the area could be much stronger, according to preliminary research from the University of California, Davis, presented at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco.
