Maximum stress on the San Andreas fault.

A large earthquake will hit Los Angeles, it is not a possibility, it is something that is going to happen, it happened in the past and we have no way of preventing it from happening again, the question is when and how we can reduce both personal and material damage, unfortunately, we have not yet created a machine that offers us an earthquake forecast with the reliability of the weather report of, for example, a hurricane that we can predict the path, the intensity and more or less the level of destruction it may have, but I am sure that one day it will be achieved. One day we will be able to have this type of forecast with earthquakes, but for now we have to be attentive to all the research that is done because all of them offer us very valuable clues and a new study reveals that something big can come; and we are facing teams of top-level scientists with the best instruments in the world and presenting field work on one of the most dangerous seismic faults on the planet.

The recent study reveals something quite disturbing in a simplified way, they say that the stress along the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults in Southern California has reached the highest levels in 1000 years. The research reached this conclusion by creating a 4D physical model, three spatial dimensions plus the dimension of time, that simulated 1000 years of seismic history on the South San Andreas and San Jacinto faults in southern California. They used paleoseismic data, radiocarbon dating, tree rings, historical records, any clue that might indicate an earthquake over those 1,000 years, and everything to see how tectonic stress builds up and is released.

Releasing tectonic stress sounds very technical, very cold, almost irreverent, especially if we take into account that sometimes that stress is released in horrible earthquakes that cause death and destruction, but to be fair, the term is quite well adjusted to reality, since on other occasions that tectonic stress is released not in a large and terrible earthquake, but in thousands of small earthquakes, many of which are not even perceived.

In California itself there is a very curious case and also a very studied case, it is the central section of the San Andreas fault between San Juan Bautista and Parfel, there the plates move continuously at about 20 to 30 mm per year, more or less the speed at which your nails grow and this movement creates quite shocking images. Old broken roads, fences and sidewalks. splits, but the movement becomes fluid and without causing major earthquakes.

This is due to the composition of the rock and materials that make up the fault, Unfortunately, the area studied now is made up of very different materials, this area is located about 300 to 350 km southeast of the previous area I was talking about, which moved fluidly. In this one that is in the news now, the tension is not released fluidly, but rather violently, after accumulating great tension, for example, in the San Jacinto Bernardino section it reaches 3.6 megapascals and in Mojave South of San Andrés 2.8 megapascals, both are very high levels and are also relatively aligned.

At the box pass, a junction near Los Angeles, where the two faults approach each other, there is what researchers call a “seismic gate.” This means that, depending on the state of stress, a large earthquake can stay on a single fault or propagate along the one next to it in that box pass, thus multiplying its destructive effect.

This “seismic gate” also depends a lot on the materials and structure. that is located at the time the earthquake occurs, for example, the last major earthquake in that place was that of Fort Tejon, 1857, magnitude 7.9, but it stopped in Pasocajón, however, the previous one in 1812, although it was of a slightly smaller magnitude, it is believed that 7.5 crossed the two faults, affecting a much wider area.

The issue is real, it is dangerous, and it is high, it is not a prediction that it will happen tomorrow, or next week, or next month, California has gone more than 160 years without a major earthquake in that specific area, so the stress has been accumulating naturally, the tectonic plates do not stop moving.

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