Admit it, there's nothing more fun than sitting in a dark theatre, munching on a bucket of buttery popcorn, and watching the Earth get demolished. In the latest round of catastrophic flicks, California is destroyed as the famous San Andreas Fault unleashes unimaginable (and unrealistic) devastation across the state.
The new film, San Andreas, depicts the rupture of an unknown fault near the Hoover Dam in Nevada, which gets the destructive ball rolling by setting off powerful earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault. And although earthquakes are nothing new to Californians, and pose serious threats along the famous fault, Hollywood has once again thrown caution (and science) to the wind in order to feed our catastrophic needs.
The San Andreas Fault is a very real hazard. At almost 800 miles long, the fault marks the boundary where the North American plate meets the Pacific plate. And it's the movement of these plates against each other that cause the powerful quakes characteristic to the region.
A recent report by the U.S. Geological Survey shows the inevitability of just such a quake, which is predicted to hit within the next couple of decades.
"The new likelihoods are due to the inclusion of possible multi-fault ruptures, where earthquakes are no longer confined to separate, individual faults, but can occasionally rupture multiple faults simultaneously," lead author of the study and USGS scientist, Ned Field says. "This is a significant advancement in terms of representing a broader range of earthquakes throughout California's complex fault system."
The study shows that the likelihood of a magnitude 8 or larger earthquake in the next 30 years has risen from about 4.7 percent to around 7 percent, based on recent findings. However, the area most at risk is along the southern end of the fault, not the northern end near San Francisco.
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