Earthquakes Hit Southern California at Every 3 Minutes, A New Study Reveals

Southern California is shaken every day and the number of earthquakes per hour is more significant than seismologists have thought. Fortunately, a lot of them are so little that no one feels them. The seismologists have discovered that California is shaking up to 10 times more than they knew. They have researched to count those tiny earthquakes happening in California with an accurate method, and they have discovered some interesting details.

What Are the Seismologists Saying?

They have found a way to use a more accurate method for finding those small earthquakes, and they have counted from 2008 to 2017, only in Southern California, 1.8 million of earthquakes. The new report is showing us that a small earthquake is happening about every three minutes, and most of them have a magnitude below 1. The purpose is to find patterns of those little earthquakes for a better understanding and prediction of the more dangerous and more significant earthquakes.

An earthquake is happening when two blocks of Earth are slipping past each other, and at the surface the ground is shaking, resulting in a release of energy in the planet’s lithosphere.

Earthquakes Hit Southern California at Every 3 Minutes

Zachary Ross, a seismologist from California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, is saying that they don’t understand fundamental things about this movement of Earth’s blocks, so every information is helpful. For finding those small earthquakes, seismologists have used an older method based on the fact that shocks have some unique patterns.

Those patterns are like a fingerprint for earthquake, and they made an effort to look for them using a sensitive device. This device is so sensitive that it can detect ocean waves, construction, traffic, and more massive earthquakes across the planet. So with a supercomputer and some algorithms, the team has the instrument to work with the earthquakes from Southern California.