Scientists issue chilling warning about 'The Big One': Impending mega–earthquake on California's notorious San Andreas fault could be even BIGGER than we thought
And now scientists have issued a chilling warning about 'The Big One' – a mega–earthquake set to rock California 's notorious San Andreas fault.
Experts from Caltech in Pasadena have studied a 7.7–magnitude earthquake that shook Myanmar in March along the Sagaing fault – a fault known for being eerily similar to San Andreas.
That earthquake ended up rupturing a much longer section of the fault than scientists expected, killing thousands and causing widespread damage.
According to the researchers, this suggests The Big One could also be even bigger than we originally thought.
'Future earthquakes might not simply repeat past known earthquakes,' said Jean–Philippe Avouac, co–author of the study.
'Successive ruptures of a given fault, even as simple as the Sagaing or the San Andreas faults, can be very different and can release even more than the deficit of slip since the last event.
'In addition, historical records are generally far too short for statistical models to represent the full range of possible earthquakes and eventual patterns in earthquake recurrence.'
The devastating earthquake hit Myanmar on 28 March 2025, killing more than 2,000 people, and leaving 3,900 injured.
The quake occurred when a section of the Sagaing fault ruptured, causing widespread damage along a swathe of territory down the middle of the country, including Sagaing, Mandalay, Magway and Bago regions and Shan State.
In their new study, the Caltech team used satellite imagery of the Sagaing Fault's motion to understand exactly what happened – and whether a similar incident could happen in California.
'This earthquake turned out to be an ideal case to apply image correlation methods that were developed by our research group,' said Solène Antoine, first author of the study.
'They allow us to measure ground displacements at the fault, where the alternative method, radar interferometry, is blind due to phenomenon like decorrelation [a process to decouple signals] and limited sensitivity to north–south displacements.'
Based on studies of previous tremors along the Sagaing fault, the researchers expected that the earthquake would occur on a 186–mile (300–kilometer) section of the fault, where no large earthquakes had occurred since 1839.
The satellite images confirmed that this was the case – but that the fault actually slipped along a total of more than 310 miles (500km).
In fact, the 310–mile section shifted by a whopping 9.8ft (three metres) after the quake.
So, what does this mean for The Big One?
Well, according to the researchers, it suggests The Big One won't look like anything we've seen before.
Previous earthquakes on the San Andreas Fault include a 7.9–magnitude earthquake in 1857, which ruptured the fault from Monterey County all the way to Los Angeles County.
Meanwhile, in 1906, an earthquake began just offshore of San Francisco, before rupturing in two directions, towards Humboldt County and Santa Cruz County.
Instead, a future rupture could result in smaller, separate earthquakes.
Or, it could be even bigger than those seen before – rupturing the fault all the way into San Bernardino, Riverside, and Imperial counties, and reaching a magnitude of 8.
The researchers now hope to use their new models to better understand what The Big One will actually look like.
'Physics–based models provide an alternative approach with the advantage that they could, in principle, be tuned to observations and used for time–dependent forecast,' Professor Avouac added.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Reuters
26 minutes ago
- Reuters
Pfizer's sickle cell drug fails late-stage trial
Aug 15 (Reuters) - Pfizer's (PFE.N), opens new tab experimental drug to treat sickle cell anemia failed to meet the main goal in a late stage trial, the drugmaker said on Friday. Results showed no significant difference between the number of vaso-occlusive crises — painful events common in sickle cell disease — among people who took the drug, named inclacumab, and those who took placebo. Pfizer said it is disappointed by the results but remains committed to supporting the sickle cell community. Inclacumab was generally well tolerated in the trial that included patients 16 years of age and older, the company said. The most common side effects reported were anemia, joint pain, back pain, headache, malaria, sickle cell crisis and upper respiratory tract infection, it said. The disease is an inherited blood disorder in which red blood cells become sickle- or crescent-shaped and can cause strokes, organ damage and death.
Evening Standard
an hour ago
- Evening Standard
Putin ‘prepares nuclear-armed missile test' ahead of Trump talks on Ukraine
Jeffrey Lewis, a researcher at the California-based Middlebury Institute of International Studies who analysed the satellite images, said: 'We can see all of the activity at the test site, which is both huge amounts of supplies coming in to support operations and movement at the place where they actually launch the missile.'
Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
Biomechanics study shows how T. rex and other dinosaurs fed on prey
WASHINGTON, Aug 15 (Reuters) - Tyrannosaurus subdued prey with raw power, using bone-crushing bite force. But other meat-eating dinosaurs that rivaled T. rex in size used different approaches. Giganotosaurus relied more on slashing and ripping flesh. And the long and narrow snout of Spinosaurus was well-adapted for catching fish. Researchers have documented the feeding biomechanics of meat-eating dinosaurs in a comprehensive analysis of the skull design and bite force of 17 species that prowled the landscape at various times from the dawn to the twilight of the age of dinosaurs. The study found that Tyrannosaurus possessed by far the highest estimated bite force, with a heavily reinforced skull and massive jaw muscles. But it showed that other dinosaur predators evolved successful approaches to bringing down prey even without matching the T. rex chomp. "We found that large predatory dinosaurs didn't all evolve the same kind of skull to deal with the challenges of feeding at massive size," said vertebrate paleontologist Andre Rowe of the University of Bristol in England, lead author of the study published this month in the journal Current Biology, opens new tab. "Some, like T. rex, reinforced the skull to tolerate extremely high bite forces and the associated skull stresses. Others, like Allosaurus or Spinosaurus, went with lighter or possibly flexible builds that spread out stress in different ways. There's no single 'correct' way to be a giant meat-eater, and that's the point," Rowe added. The study focused on species within the group, or clade, called theropods that includes the meat-eating dinosaurs. They ran from Herrerasaurus, which lived in Argentina about 230 million years ago and is one of the earliest-known dinosaurs, all the way to T. rex, which was present in western North America when an asteroid struck Earth 66 million years ago and ended the age of dinosaurs. The researchers used three-dimensional models of the skulls of the 17 species, including two different specimens of Tyrannosaurus, and applied a method for simulating how structures respond to physical stress. They estimated muscle forces using digital muscle reconstructions based on living relatives of the dinosaurs - birds and crocodiles - then applied those forces to the skull models to simulate bites. "Our focus wasn't raw bite force. We were testing how the skulls distributed that force under load, and how these distributions varied by each lineage of carnivores," Rowe said. The early theropods examined in the study such as Herrerasaurus, which lived during the middle of the Triassic Period, and Dilophosaurus, which lived early in the Jurassic Period, exhibited much lower stress resistance than their later counterparts. They were lightly built dinosaurs and not well adapted to high bite forces, Rowe said. The increase in bite force and skull strength unfolded gradually over time, reaching its apex with Tyrannosaurus and its close relatives in a lineage called tyrannosaurs such as Daspletosaurus and Albertosaurus, which like T. rex appeared late in the Cretaceous Period. "In tyrannosaurs, there's a big jump in skull strength and bite mechanics, coinciding with deeper skulls, more robust bone architecture and changes in jaw muscle attachment. So the ramp-up wasn't immediate. It evolved over time and in certain lineages more than others," Rowe said. Tyrannosaurus, Giganotosaurus and Spinosaurus were three of the largest theropods, but their skulls were quite different. Perhaps the largest-known Tyrannosaurus is a specimen named Sue at the Field Museum in Chicago, at 40-1/2 feet (12.3 meters) long. Giganotosaurus and Spinosaurus rivaled T. rex in size. Giganotosaurus lived in Argentina in the middle of the Cretaceous, while Spinosaurus inhabited North Africa at around the same time, both predating Tyrannosaurus by roughly 30 million years. "Giganotosaurus was large, but its skull wasn't built for the same kind of high-force feeding as T. rex. Spinosaurus had a long, narrow snout, which is consistent with a diet focused on fishing, though we have fossilized evidence that it ate other animals, such as pterosaurs," Rowe said, referring to the flying reptiles that were cousins of the dinosaurs. One of the key takeaway messages, Rowe said, is that giant body size did not funnel all theropods toward the same design. Stronger bite force was one strategy, but not the only one, Rowe added. "Some animals win with raw power, others by striking quickly or repeatedly. What we're seeing here is a spectrum of ecological adaptations. These animals weren't all trying to be T. rex clones. They were solving the same problem in different ways," Rowe added. "That kind of evolutionary flexibility," Rowe added, "probably helped them dominate ecosystems for so long."
