One other earthquake swarm has been rumbling alongside the California-Mexico border.
Greater than two dozen quakes larger than magnitude 2.5 have occurred since simply after midnight Saturday, with epicenters about 175 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles and 100 miles northeast of San Diego, in line with the U.S. Geological Survey.
They’ve occurred largely alongside farmland between the cities of Brawley and Imperial in Imperial County. The biggest quake was a magnitude 3.9 that struck at 4:05 p.m. Saturday, bringing gentle shaking to the Imperial Valley in addition to south of the border and rattling Mexicali.
A fair bigger earthquake — a magnitude 4.1 — occurred at 5:17 a.m. Monday about 28 miles northwest of the swarm that started Saturday.
The epicenter of that quake was in a distant desert space east of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, and weak shaking was felt as distant as San Diego, elements of Orange County, Temecula, the Coachella Valley, El Centro and Holtville.
A separate swarm of earthquakes occurred every week in the past, about 40 miles southeast of the latest quake exercise. Final week’s swarm occurred about 18 miles southeast of Mexicali in Baja California, with the most important a magnitude 4.2 that was felt as distant as El Centro in California and Yuma, Ariz.
Earthquake swarms are frequent within the Imperial Valley, seismologist Lucy Jones stated on social media Saturday. Swarms have occurred many occasions on this a part of California with out being adopted by a significant, damaging earthquake.
Nonetheless, scientists sometimes pay shut consideration to the world, the place there are various faults.
The area was notably energetic with earthquakes within the late Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties.
Of the larger quakes in historic time within the space — a magnitude 6.9 earthquake in 1940 and a magnitude 6.4 quake in Imperial Valley in 1979 — got here with none previous swarms, Jones has stated. The 1979 earthquake prompted $30 million in harm, injured 91 folks and broken greater than 1,500 houses and over 400 business buildings.
Extra important earthquakes occurred within the space in 1987. The Superstition Hills quake, which adopted a magnitude 6.2 temblor on a close-by fault that struck 11 hours earlier, prompted $4 million in harm and injured 94 folks in Imperial County and left 3,000 folks quickly homeless within the Mexicali space.
South of the California-Mexico border, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck on Easter Sunday in 2010, killing two folks in Mexicali and damaging buildings on either side of the border.
