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California In For Devastating Earthquake Within 30 Years - The Big One

April 14, 2008

A strong and potentially deadly earthquake is virtually certain to strike on one of California’s major seismic faults with a magnitude of at least 6.7 within the next 30 years, scientists said Monday in releasing the first official forecast of statewide earthquake probabilities.

By their calculations the probability of such a strong and damaging quake hitting somewhere the Golden state is now more than 99 percent.

A much more damaging quake of magnitude of 7.5 or greater is at least 46 percent likely to hit on one of California’s restless web of active fault systems within the same three decades, but probably in the southern part of the state, the team of federal and state earthquake scientists warned.

The new report by the team of federal and state geologists, seismologists and geophysicists does not significantly change the current probability estimates for future large quakes on the Bay Area’s major faults that were calculated five years ago, but it does provide the first detailed forecasts for the odds of future quakes on faults in the Los Angeles area: on the southern San Andreas, on the San Jacinto and on the Elsinore faults specifically.

“In our two major metropolitan areas where odds are high that a large quake is coming, people think a lot about quakes whenever even a smaller one shakes … but ten days later most folks forget them, and they shouldn’t,” said David Schwartz, an earthquake geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park who served on the scientific review panel that evaluated the new probability estimates. The analysis was requested by the California Earthquake Authority, a public agency created by the state Legislature in 1996 and funded by companies throughout the state that offer limited quake insurance to all comers.

The report’s details should also prove useful for city planners, building code designers and home and business owners “who can use this information to improve public safety and mitigate damage before the next destructive earthquake occurs,” said geophysicist Ned Field of the U.S. Geological Survey who headed the Working Group on California Earthquake Probabilities that developed the forecasts.

“This new, comprehensive forecast advances our understanding of earthquakes and pulls together existing research with new techniques and data,” Field said.

Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, the Southern California Earthquake Center and the California State Geological Survey participated in the report. Aside from the scientists in California who evaluated the Working Group’s conclusions, both the California and National Earthquake Prediction Councils evaluated the study too.

The scientists used complex analytical tools that they have developed over many years and new computer programs to arrive at their new forecasts of earthquake magnitudes and the faults they may rupture.

By their calculations, the probability that a 6.7 magnitude quake will hit on any one of the faults in the Bay Area is now set at 63 percent, only a tiny bit higher than the 62 percent estimated in 2003. But the probability for that kind of severely damaging quake on the Hayward-Rodgers Creek fault was increased in the new forecast from 27 percent to 31 percent.

The analysis was the first the scientists done of probabilities for quakes on several Southern California faults. They calculated the odds of a 6.7 magnitude quake striking within 30 years somewhere in the greater Los Angeles at two-to-one, a probability of 67 percent, according to the report.

The single fault in all California with the highest probability of a large quake occurring within the next 30 years is the Southern San Andreas, and the seismic odds-makers set the number for it at 59 percent.

Looking at Northern California’s farthest region - actually the southern end of the 750-mile-long Cascadia Subduction Zone which stretches far up the Pacific Coast into British Columbia - the quake experts set the probability for a large quake within 30 years at only 10 percent, but concluded it could register a magnitude of 8 or even 9. Quakes that powerful occur once every 500 years on average.

Estimating probabilities for future earthquakes is highly complicated and calls for analysis of many factors: the average time between quakes that have struck on a given fault; the location, the size and the time when a quake last ruptured a given fault; the type of quake that hit, the geology of the region, and the rate at which the Earth’s crust is moving.

“The further you are in time from the last quake on a fault, the higher the probability is for the next one,” Schwartz said.

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