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Earthquakes

Cracking Los Angeles

Nature volume 394, pages 320–321 (1998)Cite this article

Los Angeles is caught in a vice, locked between the converging tectonic plates of North America and the Pacific. As a result, the Earth's crust beneath the city is shattered like glass, cut by faults of many shapes and sizes. Defining the motions along these faults, and the forces that may be released in earthquakes, is a complicated process, even when aided by satellites of the Global Positioning System (GPS). On page 356 of this issue1, Walls et al.provide the latest estimates of these motions and thus of seismic risk. They conclude that a certain class of fault beneath Los Angeles, known as strike-slip and akin to the great San Andreas fault, may be more dangerous than has been thought.

The faults most likely to generate damaging earthquakes are the largest ones that show evidence of recent motions. Geologists study these faults by digging shallow trenches across them and boring into them to find evidence of past earthquakes. If the past is a prologue, then these palaeoseismic records provide a way of predicting earthquake activity. Moreover, significant advances have been made in our ability to track fault movement using precise measurements of the GPS. These subtle motions ‘load’ (place stress on) faults and presumably give indications of future earthquakes.

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Figure 1: Perspective views of the two classes of faults that cause damaging earthquakes in the Los Angeles area.

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  1. the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, 20 Oxford Street, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA

    John H. Shaw

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  1. John H. Shaw
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Shaw, J. Cracking Los Angeles. Nature 394, 320–321 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/28498

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