(OPINION) Trillions of gallons of rain have already fallen on the state of California, and more rain continues to fall as I write this article. Billions of dollars in damage have already been done, but of even greater concern is what all of this water could mean for southern California’s fault lines.
As you will see below, geophysicists have discovered that the additional weight that flooding puts on fault lines can help trigger earthquakes. Of course, we have been warned for many years that “the Big One” is way overdue in southern California, and when it finally happens it will be a disaster unlike anything we have ever seen before.
Water is very heavy. If you doubt this, just try lugging a couple of gallons of water around with you for a while. Now trillions of gallons of rain have poured down on California, and all of that added weight is going to put additional stress on the fault lines in the southern portion of the state.
A number of years ago, a team of geophysicists determined that flooding helped trigger major earthquakes in southern California “at least three times in the past 2,000 years”…
Geophysicists have linked historical earthquakes on the southern section of California’s famed San Andreas fault to ancient floods from the nearby Colorado River.
The work has broad implications for understanding how floods or reservoirs relate to quakes — a topic that gained new relevance in 2008, after a massive earthquake in China’s Sichuan province killed more than 80,000 people. Some geologists have proposed that impounding water behind a newly built dam there helped hasten the quake.
Now, new work in southern California suggests that at least three times in the past 2,000 years, the weight of river water spreading across floodplains seems to have helped trigger earthquakes in the region.
Geophysicist Daniel Brothers was one of the scientists that worked on this study, and he was very confident about what his team discovered…
“We found quakes happened about every 100 to 200 years and were correlated with floods,” says Brothers. “The Colorado River spills, loads the crust and then there is a rupture.” He says the team is “very confident” in its evidence for the existence of three flood-derived quakes, of roughly magnitude 6, which happened about 600 years ago, 1,100 years ago and 1,200–1,900 years ago. “Sediments don’t lie,” he says.
With all of that in mind, let’s talk about what has just happened in southern California. Some of the rainfall totals that we have seen so far are just staggering…
The highest total came at the Cogswell Dam above Pasadena. NWS monitors at that site recorded 13.15 inches of rain in the past 72 hours.
A little farther south, Beverly Hills has seen 8.61 inches of rainfall, Culver City 7.71 inches and Downtown L.A. to the east has endured 8.13 inches.
That means that in just three days, downtown Los Angeles has received more than half of its 30-year average seasonal rainfall, which is 14.25 inches.
And it is being reported that UCLA’s weather station experienced “a 1-in-1,000 year rainfall event”… The 11.87 inches that fell in 24 hours at UCLA’s weather station was a 1-in-1,000-year rainfall event.
Technically known as a “1,000-year recurrence interval event,” according to meteorologist Jacob Feuerstein, a 1-in-1,000-year rain event is a statistical way of expressing the probability of such a huge rainfall occurring in any given year in a given location, according to NOAA.
That is certainly a lot of rain! Overall, it has been estimated that approximately 5.6 trillion gallons of rain fell on California in a 48 hour period…
A rough calculation estimates that 5.6 trillion gallons of water has fallen across California the past two days, according to FOX Weather meteorologist Greg Diamond. Of course, that is not a final number.
More rain continued to fall after that estimate was made, and it is still raining in California as I write this article. What we are witnessing is truly unprecedented, and all of this water is going to put immense pressure on southern California’s fault lines.
We’ll get back to that in a minute. But first, let me talk a bit about the damage that all of this water has already caused.
In an article that I posted a few days ago, I speculated that this disaster would cause billions of dollars of damage in the state, and it appears that is precisely what has happened…(READ MORE)
