Monday’s 4.4 magnitude earthquake in El Sereno and last week’s 5.2 magnitude shaker in the Bakersfield area have served as wake-up calls for many Southern Californians. But they aren’t necessarily omens for a shaky, quaky immediate future.
Yehuda Ben-Zion, Director of the Statewide California Earthquake Center and Professor of Earth Sciences at USC, told KNX News Chief Correspondent Charles Feldman the earthquakes are indirectly linked and they’re not necessarily a trend.
“The entire subsurface of California is intersected by a network of faults, a web of faults. So in that sense, everything is linked,” he explained. “But there is no direct, clear, you know, worrying link between those separate earthquakes. They just tend to pop up and they will continue to pop up.”
Ben-Zion said larger earthquakes in the state are unavoidable. Generally, he explained, people don’t need to be apprehensive over earthquakes. But on a geological time scale, California is deforming and it’s an unstoppable plate motion.