The Ridgecrest temblors that hit California last year could make a San Andreas earthquake more likely, a new study found.

The likelihood is higher because the 2019 temblors in Ridgecrest, Calif., "stressed the Garlock Fault," and the Garlock Fault links the Ridgecrest faults with the San Andreas fault, researchers said in the study, published Monday in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.

The 6.4-magnitude and 7.1-magnitude Ridgecrest earthquakes caused no deaths and modest damage because they were in a remote desert area of Southern California, but they "could have far-reaching effects," according to researchers.

If another big earthquake ruptures the Garlock, it could cause a chain reaction that triggers a San Andreas earthquake north of Los Angeles, researchers said. The probability of such a rupture in the next year remains low at a 2.3 percent chance, but that's still 100 times higher than previous models have found.

"So, the sky is not falling, co-author Ross Stein, CEO of Temblor, which assesses the risks of earthquakes, told National Geographic. "But it is significantly higher, in our judgment, than what it would have been had the Ridgecrest earthquake not occurred."

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Typhoon changed earthquake patterns
Potsdam, Germany (SPX) Jul 03, 2020
The Earth's crust is under constant stress. Every now and then this stress is discharged in heavy earthquakes, mostly caused by the slow movement of Earth's crustal plates. There is, however, another influencing factor that has received little attention so far: intensive erosion can temporarily change the earthquake activity (seismicity) of a region significantly. This has now been shown for Taiwan by researchers from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in cooperation with international ... read more