Scientists at a prominent Southern California university have warned that a fast-moving variety of earthquakes could produce more violent shaking over larger areas than typical tremors, arguing that California should update its emergency planning to reflect the greater risk.
Researchers at the University of Southern California’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences compared “supershear” earthquakes to sonic booms due to their ability to generate rapid shocks in the ground that outpace their seismic shear waves.
The potential danger is especially relevant for California because many of the state’s largest cities lie along fault lines, many of which are strike-slip and vulnerable to quakes of magnitude 7 or stronger, according to the 2025 report by USC’s Statewide California Earthquake Center.
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“While California is no more likely to have supershear earthquakes than other, similar regions with large fault systems like the San Andreas, the threat has gone unnoticed for too long,” said Yehuda Ben-Zion, director of the SCEC. “The frequency of these supershear ruptures has been greatly underappreciated.”…