Southern California was recently rattled by several small earthquakes. They produced minor shaking but nonetheless left psychological aftershocks in a region whose seismic vulnerabilities are matched by our willingness to put the dangers out of our minds. For many, it all added to one question: Is this the beginning of something bigger? First, a magnitude 3.
6 earthquake in the Ojai Valley sent weak shaking from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles on May 31. Then came two small quakes under the eastern L.A.
neighborhood of El Sereno, the most powerful a 3.4 . Finally, a trio of tremors hit the Costa Mesa-Newport Beach border, topping out at a magnitude 3.
6 Thursday. Having half a dozen earthquakes with a magnitude over 2.5 in a week, hitting three distinct parts of Southern California, all in highly populated areas, is not a common occurrence.
But experts say these smaller quakes have no predictive power over the next major, destructive earthquake in urban Southern California, the last of which came 30 years ago. California An upgrade to California’s earthquake early-warning system using GPS data will allow more timely alerts about shaking and better estimate the magnitude of a megaquake. June 5, 2024 Generally speaking, there is a 1 in 20 chance any earthquake in California will be followed by one that’s larger, said Susan Hough, a seismologist with the U.
S. Geological Survey. Those odds aren’t high, and typically, the subsequent, larger quake would occur in the same area with.
