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    Why hasn't LA seen a big San Andreas quake recently? Researchers find a clue

    by Rong-Gong Lin II, Los Angeles Times Jun 09, 2023 6 minutes
    A receding shoreline at the Salton Sea on April 4, 2023, in Coachella Valley, California. The Salton Sea is a shallow, landlocked, highly saline body of water in Riverside and Imperial counties at the southern end of the U.S. state of California. It lies on the San Andreas Fault within the Salton Trough, which stretches to the Gulf of California in Mexico.

    It's a riddle that has both blessed California and still raises worries for the future: Why hasn't L.A. seen a big San Andreas earthquake in generations? And what does that mean when it does come?

    A new study provides a possible answer — the drying Salton Sea, about 150 miles southeast of L.A., and the lack of sudden, major floodwaters funneling into it since it formed more than a century ago.

    But one thing is certain. The drought of earthquakes on the San Andreas fault will not last. A drying Salton Sea may be helping delay the next Big One, but that could result in a more powerful quake when it does strike.

    A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature by scientists at San Diego State University and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego aimed to help explain why the southernmost tip of the San Andreas fault, close to the Mexican border, hasn't had an earthquake of a magnitude 7 or greater in about 300 years.

    That's an unusually long gap. Other sections of the San

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