12 thoughts on “California Major Earthquakes”

1. I remember how insistent the experts were that Loma Prieta wasn’t “The Big One” after it hit in 1989, and thinking they were being a little quick on the trigger with that.

   But further south there have been a couple of damn big ones, if not quite as big, since then — so I suppose they may have been right. Then again, does every “big one” have to be a single huge quake, or can the tectonic stress equivalent to a big one be relieved over a span of decades by a series of seriously major quakes along the same big fault complex?

   Obviously I am not a seismologist.

   1. Here in central Oklahoma waste water injection is being blamed for numerous small quakes over time. I’mna thinking they’re relief quakes preventing stresses from building to dangerous levels. Pretty sure that idea would be DOA in CA. And I have no proof. Just seems a possibility.

      1. Unless they’re injecting the water several miles down, the resulting tremors (assuming the claims are correct) wouldn’t be relieving stress on potential natural quake sources. Most real earthquakes originate 10 to 400 mile deep.

         1. No, it’s the fracking. Earthquakes due to our use of fossil fuels.
            Another example of catastrophic anthropogenic plate tectonics…

2. Given the logarithmic nature of the Richter scale, it would take a bunch of sevens to relieve the stress to prevent an eight.

3. And I’m reading this as I sit in LAX….waiting for a later flight….

   1. At least you already had a flight out. Think of all those that stayed behind.

4. May well be a good time to get out. I know there’s an unexplained correlation between volcanic activity and low sunspot counts, but I don’t know whether that’s true for earthquakes, too.

   And we’ve been in a period of very low sunspot activity for several years now with no end in sight.

   1. Hadn’t heard that about earthquakes. Guess this is a goos time to see if it holds up.

5. Are the warmistas going to blame the earthquake drought on global warming, like they do they decline in hurricanes and tornadoes?

   1. Everyone knows earthquakes are the result of the crust expanding as the planet warms.

6. The problem is that it might take another century or three before anything happens.

   When they go, they’ll probably be much like the slip fault in northern Turkey (which is similar in scale to the San Andreas fault zone) with one after another going along the San Andreas (and nearby faults like the Hayward fault zone, Garlock fault, and all those smaller fault zones around the San Andreas some which might not have been discovered yet). They probably won’t go all at once, but you’d see a few years or decades between each major earthquake.

   I guess the analogue is something like a zipper with one part of the fault mess going first, pause, and then neighboring pieces, pause, and then neighboring pieces, and so on.

   Come to think of it, if that’s standard behavior for the San Andreas area, then a century of pause is not rare, but normal.

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