Posted on 06/07/2021 7:12:46 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Monday’s largest quake hit at about 2:08 p.m. at the south tip of the sea, about 8 miles northwest of Calipatria and 25 miles north of El Centro, USGS said.
People reported feeling strong shaking at the epicenter and weak movement as far away as San Diego, Cathedral City and El Centro.
Swarms are common in the Imperial Valley, and past swarms in the area have stayed active for about a week on average. Those include a 1981 swarm around Westmorland that included a 5.8 magnitude quake, and a 2012 swarm near Brawley that included a magnitude 5.4 temblor.
The main fault involved appears to be the Westmoreland fault, which is not long enough for a quake much bigger than magnitude 5.8...
"Today's swarm is not close enough to the San Andreas fault to raise concern. We have never seen a foreshock more than 10 km from its mainshock and this swarm is aobut 25 km from the end of the San Andreas fault." https://t.co/35SElVoJNW
— Dr. Lucy Jones (@DrLucyJones) June 5, 2021
(Excerpt) Read more at ktla.com ...
Oh yeah? Well there's plenty of other earthquake faults in California besides the San Andreas that can "raise concern", lady.
oh gawd
i swear i’ll get of bed for anything over 7.1
Dr. Lucy Jones?
She’s the earthquake expert. Did you notice how the experts always use phrases like, “No impact expected on San Andreas”.
So if a giant crack swallows up half of California, Lucy will simply say, “ It was unexpected”!
I have been there once, pretty trippy
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=slab+city&t=h_&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images
Spent lots of time (many years ago) in the Imperial Valley (Niland, Calipatria, Brawley, and the fabulous stockyard city of El Centro)...
IMHO, these tremblors are NBD routine...
Did relief work in El Centro after the 79 quake ,and many mornings the wind would carry in the stockyard smell.
Asked the locals how they tolerated the smell, and the response was always: “What smell?”
Sadly, I thing gets swallowed up. Just shaken really well.
Nothing gets...
I’ve been listening to this odd swarm for a a few days now.
From the www.usgs.gov map
(Zoom in to Southern California, select Settings from the lower left corner to bring upa bar with variable magnitude earthquakes and variable date selection criteria for more “fun” )
I’m disagreeing with this self-selected “expert” in that the USGS site shows the San Andreas Fault going right through this swarm at the south tip of the Salton Sea. Of the recent 1200 earthquakes in the nearby 100 miles region, more than 60% have occurred in the last 3 days (Most, of course, less than Mag 2.5. But still, that’s a large increase in a little area. More like a very focused spot less than 10 miles across - almost like a volcanic magma intrusion (future eruption) than a fault line slip.
Looking at a map, check the Salton Sea’s location and continue that south into the Gulf of California in Mexico. It appears to be a natural breaking point, right where the Colorado River dumps into the Gulf.
there is a cinder cone in that area that erupted IIRC about 8,000 years ago.
When I saw the swarm on the USGS map, I immediately thought about the Iceland earthquakes that preceded the recent volcanic eruption.
Shaken, not stirred.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea#History
[snip] The Gulf of California would extend as far north as Indio, were it not for the delta created by the Colorado River. Over three million years, through all of the Pleistocene, the river’s delta expanded until it cut off the northern part of the gulf. Since then, the Colorado River has alternated between emptying into the basin, creating a freshwater lake, and emptying into the gulf, leaving the lake to dry and turn to desert. Wave-cut shorelines at various elevations record a repeated cycle of filling and drying over hundreds of thousands of years. The most recent freshwater lake was Lake Cahuilla, also known as the Blake Sea after American professor and geologist William Phipps Blake. It covered over 2,000 square miles (5,200 km2), six times the area of the Salton Sea.
Archaeological sites and radiocarbon dates indicate that the lake was filled three or four times over the last 1300 years. When full, the lake would attract Native Americans to its shores. Hundreds of sites have been found, some possibly long-term villages and other temporary camps. The occupants ate at least four species of fish (two of which were razorback sucker and bonytail chub), birds (particularly the coot), black-tailed jackrabbit, black-tailed cottontail rabbit, and sometimes deer and bighorn sheep. Among the plants they used were bulrush, cattail, mesquite, and saltbush. The Cahuilla people have an oral memory of the last lake, which existed in the 17th century and dried up soon after 1700 AD. [/snip]
There's that word, 'expected', again.......................
I have been watching the You Tube lectures of a Washington geologist.
He says the Cascadian earthquake triggered by subduction of the Juan de Fuca plate will devastate Washington and Oregon and some of northern California. The quake will probably be accompanied by volcanic activity
That disruption will trigger large movements along the San Andreas fault. Generally, the San Andreas movements are small and spaced so the disruption is not great. The Cascadian quake will precipitate large movement and great potential damage along the San Andrea’s.
Every thing he said made perfect sense
“Looking at a map, check the Salton Sea’s location and continue that south into the Gulf of California in Mexico. It appears to be a natural breaking point, right where the Colorado River dumps into the Gulf.”
Yep... That was once all part of the sea of Cortez, the geology points towards Baja once being an island with a strait at Palm Springs west through to San Bernardino. The Pacific plate has since pushed it up through subduction and is still pushing it up. That is a major crust movement zone right along through there as you say.
Yeah - It’s splitting like the narrow Seas around the Great Rift valley now in Ethiopia and the Gulf of Aden, Red Sea : The Salton Sea area is below sea level. It “should be” naturally flooded by the Colorado River if dams and dikes had not been built - and then repaired several times! - between the 1870’s and the final Hoover Dam improvements and canals in the 1930’s.
Baja California is a long, narrow split-off piece of land moving north-northwest towards San Francisco that is divided from the rest of Mexico by these fault lines through the Salton Sea and Imperial Valley.
Yep. There is another major influence right there also. San Gorgonio Pass just north of there happens to be the eastern end of a major 90 degree sea fault across the pacific plate that reaches way out past Hawaii. So that particular spot is the top eastern corner tip of a huge mass of movement. It is not creating any resistance at all and at the mercy of this huge influence.
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