(NBC NEWS) Several faults underlying urban areas in the San Francisco Bay Area may be primed for a major rupture that could lead to a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake, new data suggest.
Sections of the Hayward, Rodgers Creek and Green Valley faults are nearing or past their average earthquake recurrence intervals, according to the study published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.
The faults appear to be locked, unable to accommodate the inexorable movement of the Pacific Plate past the North American Plate, and that means it’s only a matter of time before one of those stuck segments gives way, producing a large earthquake, says the study’s lead author, Jim Lienkaemper, a research geophysicist at the U. S. Geological Survey.
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