The odds of a sizable earthquake along the San Andreas fault spiked dramatically due to a recent swarm of small quakes around the Salton Sea.
Rob Graves, a geophysicist and earthquake expert at Caltech says the threat was serious.
“In any one week period, the chances of having a large earthquake magnitude seven or greater on the San Andreas fault are a little bit less than one in ten thousand. During the earlier part of last week while this swarm activity was going on, those odds bumped up – the highest we got to – these are the model-based – but the highest probabilities early in the week last week were one in a hundred.”
The last big quake on the southern sector of the San Andreas fault was in 1690. And there is supposed to be a big quake on the fault every 300 years or so, it may be inferred that we are overdue for the next big one by about 26 years.
“I want to caution the use of the term overdue,” said Graves. “Unfortunately, earthquakes do not adhere to our human perception of regularity.”
Graves was a guest on 790 KABC’s McIntyre in the Morning Show with Doug McIntyre and Terri-Rae Elmer.
