California is a major city along the Ring of Fire – a fault line which stretches from New Zealand, all across the east coast of Asia, over to Canada down to the southern tip of South America.
In the last few days, earthquakes have struck the coast of Alaska, California, Papua New Guinea, Mexico, Indonesia, Hawaii and Chile while Japan has seen the spectacular eruption of Mount Kusatsu-Shirane – all of which are on the Ring of Fire.
California, which is a highly seismic region by itself, has been touted as a location in the future for major earthquakes, and scientists warn that it will definitely happen and could bring the State to its knees.
Seismologist Lucy Jones, a research associate at Caltech’s Seismological Laboratory and founder of the Dr Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society, told US radio WBUR: “There is no way to predict the time of when it will happen, but that it will happen is an absolute certainty.
“It’s like, you aren’t going to stop the sun shining, and you aren’t going stop the plates moving.
“And as long as the plates keep on moving, eventually the earthquakes have to happen. We just don’t know when.”
California sits on top of the potentially catastrophic San Andreas fault, a chasm between two massive plates of the Earth’s crust that extends hundreds of miles across the country.
Also, beneath California, the Pacific and North American tectonic plates are moving northward – although the former is moving quicker leading to a build up of tension.
He told Raw Story: “The San Andreas fault in southern California last had a major quake in 1857 (magnitude 7.9).
“Studies that have dated previous major offsets along the fault trace show that there have been about 10 major quakes over the past 1,000-2,000 years… the average time between these quakes is about 100-150 years.”