Posted on 03/15/2015 7:00:21 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Earlier this week, the U.S. Geological Survey released a new study, which concluded that California faces a bigger chance of experiencing a powerful earthquake in the next 30 years than previous studies had predicted.
Non-seismologists who just glanced at the news headlines about the study -- including ours -- may have been left worrying that the risk of "The Big One" is now greater, due to some alarming change in Earthquake faults.
But the explanation is actually more complicated, though not necessarily more comforting. The upside is that recent discoveries about the nature of earthquakes and how they spread, coupled with advances in supercomputer software and monitoring technology, now enable scientists to make more accurate predictions about future quakes.
The Third Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast, also known as UCERF3, used those conceptual and technological advances to predict that the chances of an 8.0 or greater event -- roughly, the equivalent of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 -- rocking the state in the next 30 years has increased from 4.7 percent to 7.0 percent. Meanwhile, the chances of significant but less-than-catastrophic quakes in the 6.5 to 7.0 range actually has gone down slightly in the new forecast.
The big reason for the difference from previous forecasts is that scientists have figured out how to solve a longstanding limitation in earthquake prediction models, according to Tom Jordan, a University of Southern California professor of earth sciences and one of the study's authors.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.discovery.com ...
Sounds about right.
And of course there there is the plate boundary.
The above is a pure "statement of faith", presented with zero evidence that the new models are correct.
This type of faith is the death of science.
The seismic activity I’m curious about is the line of activity from off shore Eureka to Nevada. It’s a straight line of quakes. It looks like a zipper to the big one of the Cascadia fault to me.
Fixed it.
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