More Earthquake Faults Under Salton Sea, Tremors San Andreas

Sound waves bounced off the lake bed reveal the shifting blocks of crust, leading to a new theory of how the ground is sinking and stretching near the infamous San Andreas fault.

By bouncing sound waves off the floor of the Salton Sea, researchers have discovered more than a dozen previously unknown earthquake faults, leading to a new theory of how the ground is sinking and stretching near the infamous San Andreas fault.

Danny Brothers, lead author of a study published Sunday, said the new understanding of the area’s seismic mechanics does not appear to suggest that a massive quake on the San Andreas is more imminent than previously believed. Earthquake scientists have been interested in the region, about 140 miles east of Los Angeles, because the southernmost end of the San Andreas disappears at the banks of the Salton Sea.

Salton Sea is swarming with earthquake data

“By all reports, the San Andreas is considered overdue,” Brothers, a geophysics graduate student at UC San Diego, said Monday. “What this does is gives us more information to assess it. Now we can start to run some scenarios on how earthquakes beneath the Salton Sea might affect the state of stress on the San Andreas and vice versa.”

Scientists have not had very detailed maps of the crust under the Salton Sea, in part because underwater conditions have made it difficult to employ traditional techniques for studying faults. For years, scientists inferred fault locations there by studying earthquake data. The recordings led scientists to suggest that blocks of crust were swiveling side to side, but generally moving horizontally.

Source

Tremors near San Andreas earthquake fault signal increased stress

Scientists have detected an increase in mysterious underground tremors along a stretch of the San Andreas fault, signaling stress that could boost the likelihood of a major earthquake.

Seismic tools buried in deep holes near the town of Parkfield, 175 miles south of San Jose, have found that the number of tremors along the fault has increased up to 80 percent over four years, according to University of California-Berkeley seismologist Robert Nadeau and graduate student Aurélie Guilhem.

The study, published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, offers no precise forecast of a rupture along this restless region. But it may bring scientists one step closer toward the long-sought goal of predicting potentially devastating quakes. The same pressure that stimulates tremors may also stimulate quakes.

Read More

William Branham saw this over 40 years Ago

From his sermon Choosing of A Bride in 1965:

That’s solemn warning. We don’t know what time. And you don’t know what time that this city one day is going to be laying out here in the bottom of this ocean.

“O, Capernaum,” said Jesus, “thou who exalted into heaven will be brought down into hell, for if the mighty works had been done in Sodom and Gomorrah, it’d have been standing till this day.” And Sodom and Gomorrah lays at the bottom of the Dead Sea, and Capernaum’s in the bottom of the sea. Thou city, who claims to be the city of the Angels, who’s exalted yourself into heaven and sent all the dirty filthy things of fashions and things, till even the foreign countries come here to pick up our filth and send it away, with your fine churches and steeples, and so forth the way you do; remember, one day you’ll be laying in the bottom of this sea. You’re great honeycomb under you right now.

The wrath of God is belching right beneath you. How much longer He’ll hold this sandbar hanging over that, when that ocean out yonder a mile deep will slide in there plumb back to the Salton Sea. It’ll be worse than the last day of Pompeii. Repent, Los Angeles. Repent the rest of you and turn to God. The hour of His wrath is upon the earth. Flee while there’s time to flee and come into Christ.” Let us pray.

Salton Sea Is Swarming With Earthquake Data

It’s one of the great mysteries of Southern California seismology: Every couple of years, the remote desert area around the Salton Sea is shaken by swarms of small to moderate earthquakes that often last several days.

The swarms returned this week, with the area recording more than 200 temblors since Saturday — including several that were felt Wednesday. But this time, scientists had sophisticated instruments in the ground to record the activity, helping them to better understand the swarms and how they can affect seismic risk elsewhere.

Scientists have noticed that the quakes appear to have a pattern, moving southeast as the days progress. But a bigger question remains: Can the quakes trigger larger — and potentially more destructive — quakes along the San Andreas fault, which terminates at the shore of the Salton Sea?

A creep meter on the San Andreas just north of the Salton Sea area, operated by the University of Colorado, found a 0.002-inch slip on the fault right after the largest earthquake in the swarm — a magnitude 4.8 on Tuesday.

Experts say that’s a tiny slip for a fault so large, but the novelty of having that kind of data is tantalizing for scientists.

“If you look at the statistics, they say the odds of something bigger happening is on the order of 1%,” said Susan Hough of the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena. “It raises your blood pressure as a seismologist, but we’re trying to read the tea leaves.”

Seismologists have long suspected that quakes in the Salton Sea area can trigger movement on other nearby faults, including the San Andreas. The strongest evidence of this occurred in 1987, when a magnitude 6.2 earthquake near the Salton Sea triggered a magnitude 6.6 quake 12 hours later on the Superstition Hills fault to the south.

Experts are still trying to figure out why the hard-scrabble landscape of desert expanse and small struggling towns around the sea is so seismically active.

The sea sits atop a very thin crust that is being constantly stretched as the North American and Pacific plates grind against each other. The area is also veined by dozens of fault lines that run parallel to and criss-cross one another.

The area experienced regular quake swarms until 1979, when a large temblor just south of the U.S.-Mexico border seemed to curb activity, said Doug Given, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist.

But this quiet period appears to have ended.

Read Full Article

Southern California Quake Swarm: A Precursor to the Big One?

There has been a swarm of earthquakes in one area of Southern California that scientists in Pasadena are watching closely, with more than 20 temblors hitting this morning.

The biggest of the 24 quakes recorded this morning was a magnitude-4.8 which struck at 4:55 a.m. near the Salton Sea in Imperial County, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The quake was centered three miles south of the small town of Bombay Beach and 90 miles east of San Diego.

It was followed by a swarm of smaller quakes, which were recorded between 4:58 a.m. and 6:14 a.m. around Bombay Beach. Most of those temblors registered lower than a 3.0-magnitude, officials said.

There were no immediate reports of any injury or damages.

Scores of small quakes have shaken the area in recent days.

The activity has sparked the interest of scientists who want to see if small faults crossing under the Salton Sea are transferring energy to a section of the more dangerous San Andreas fault, which has not popped in more than 300 years.

An earthquake that starts in Bombay Beach and ripples northwest along the San Andreas fault could be the Big One that devastates Los Angeles, Graham Kent, a research geophysicist at UC San Diego, told the Los Angeles Times.

The activity is being monitored by a system run the U.S. Geological Survey and Caltech in Pasadena.

In a 48-hour period starting Saturday morning, 42 quakes shook just south of Bombay Beach on the Salton Sea, ranging in magnitude from 0.5 to 3.3.

via Quake Swarm: A Precursor to the Big One?.

Study Finds Troubling Pattern of Southern California Earthquakes

Large earthquakes have rumbled along a southern section of the San Andreas fault more frequently than previously believed, suggesting that Southern California could be overdue for a strong temblor on the notorious fault line, a new study has found.

The Carrizo Plain section of the San Andreas has not seen a massive quake since the much-researched Fort Tejon temblor of 1857, which at an estimated magnitude of 7.9 is considered the most powerful earthquake to hit Southern California in modern times.

But the new research by UC Irvine scientists, to be published next week, found that major quakes occurred there roughly every 137 years over the last 700 years. Until now, scientists believed big quakes occurred along the fault roughly every 200 years.

The findings are significant because seismologists have long believed this portion of the fault is capable of sparking the so-called Big One that officials have for decades warned will eventually occur in Southern California.

“It’s been long enough since 1857 that we should be concerned about another great earthquake that ruptures through this part of the fault,” said Ken Hudnut, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena who was not involved in the study.

Many scientists thought the Carrizo area produced relatively infrequent but large-scale earthquakes such as the Fort Tejon temblor. The new work suggests the area produces more quakes but also ones of a smaller magnitude than Fort Tejon, said Ray Weldon, a University of Oregon geologist who was not involved in the research but reviewed the paper for the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Source