The shrinking of the Salton Sea has reduced stress on the San Andreas Fault, possibly reducing the frequency/severity of earthquakes in Southern California, according to research from SDSU and Scripps_Ocean published today.
SAN DIEGO – The shrinking and drying out of the Salton Sea has reduced stress on the San Andreas Fault, possibly reducing the frequency and severity of earthquakes in Southern California, according to research from San Diego State University and the UC San Diego Scripps Institute of Oceanography published today.
For the last 1,000 years, major earthquakes emanating from the southern San Andreas Fault, roughly running south from the San Bernardino Mountains to Bombay Beach in Imperial County, have coincided with periods when the basin that holds the Salton Sea filled with water to form the prehistoric Lake Cahuilla — a body of water six times the size of the present-day Salton Sea.
The research, funded by the Southern California Earthquake Center, National Science Foundation, NASA, and the U.S. Geological Survey, suggests that the tight relationship between big-time seismic activity and the filling of the Salton Sea basin may also help explain why the southern section of the San Andreas Fault is long overdue for its next major shakeup.
“From our results it looks like Salton Sea drying out has contributed to stabilizing the southern San Andreas, a fault that poses an enormous seismic hazard to millions of people,” said Ryley Hill, the study’s first author and a PhD candidate in the geophysics earthquake science and applied geophysics joint doctoral program between SDSU and Scripps.
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