![]() Their answer? Water, or to be more specific, the lack thereof. Wanting to better understand this seismic outlier, scientists from San Diego State University (SDSU) and UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography investigated why the fault is behaving differently today than it has in the past. But the southern San Andreas Fault (SSAF) hasn’t had a good shaking for more than 300 years (despite what mediocre Hollywood disaster films would have you believe). Scientists estimate that this section of fault-over the past 1,000 years-usually triggered a sizable earthquake every 180 years (give or take 40). ![]() Scientists divide the fault into three distinct areas-northern, central, and southern-and while the entire fault is a clear and present earthquake danger, it’s the Los Angeles-adjacent southern section that’s most concerning. A meeting of the North American and Pacific tectonic plates, this transform fault (where two tectonic plates move past each other) runs nearly the entire length of California, from Cape Mendocino in Redwood country to the desert landscapes of Joshua Tree National Park. The 800-mile San Andreas Fault is one of the largest fault lines in the world. A new paper details how low water levels of the Salton Sea, which was once a part of a much larger lake, could explain why earthquakes along this southern fault line have been less frequent.To understand this earthquake “drought,” scientists used computer modeling and analyzed 1,000 years of palaeoseismic data to figure out its cause.The southern section of California’s San Andreas fault hasn’t experienced a major earthquake in 300 years, and is around a century overdo for a “big one.”.
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