Did you know that Los Angeles has already experienced an earthquaketoday ? In fact , at the time of committal to writing , six earthquake have go on in the last calendar week , and 568 in the preceding year . This should come as no surprise to the citizens of Los Angeles , a city build on the truly massiveSan Andreas Fault , the slipping , grating limit between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates . Although these earthquakes – generated by the constantly move fault – were far from withering , residents of the City of Angels know that their metropolis has hurt cataclysmal tremors before , and it will one day do so again . A newstudyby NASA has let on with 99.9 % certainty that a order of magnitude 5.0 temblor will hit the city of 3.9 million people before the summer of 2018 .
The research , published in the journalEarth and Space Science , is a rare seismology study in that the author state that they areessentially 100 % confidentsuch a quake will hit Los Angeles within a short time period . They also await into the likeliness of more knock-down earthquake ; the chance for an M6.0 earthquake within the same time frame is low , at 35 % . The most powerful seism in the 20th century , measure at M7.8 , was centre on the nearby city of San Francisco in1906 , where 3,000 multitude died in the subsequent destruction .
Earthquakes go on on the San Andreas Fault line when stress build up between the two architectonic plates , which are slide against each other in polar directions . When parts of the tectonic crustal plate get stuck , the plate stay on to try and keep move , which establish up stress . finally , the stress is give up , and the architectonic collection plate judder send on , causing an quake . The greater this emphasis , the larger the eventual earthquake . The more herculean emphasis releases are far less common , so more energetic quakes happen less often .
A moderateM5.1 quakethat impacted the greater Los Angeles area in 2014 appears to have been part of a serial of more shallow tremors . Seismologists at NASA ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( JPL ) , who have been map the distortion under Los Angeles using GPS information and ground - penetrating radar , have concluded that this shallow drift of tremors suggests that there is a deep part of the fracture zone still accumulating stress that has yet to be unloosen . The longer this stress build up , the more powerful the eventual temblor will be .
Earthquakes are measured these days by how much vigor they release at the focal breaker point of the fault breach , known as the epicentre . This Energy Department dismission ( in joules ) is placed on themoment order of magnitude scale(M ) , which is used by seismologist instead of the older Richter magnitude scale . To put this in perspective , an apple falling from a lowly tree to the ground releases one joule of energy . An M5.0 , which according to NASA will definitely occur in the next three years in Los Angeles , typically releases one hundred billion Joule , the eq of one million sticks of dynamite .
The certainty of the study ’s prediction , however , is already beingdebatedby theUnited States Geological Survey , who are n’t sure how the 99.9 % value was attained .
