New fault line discovered along Salton Sea
By Barrett Newkirk, Desert Sun
Scientists say they’ve discovered a new fault line running along the eastern edge of the Salton Sea parallel to the San Andreas Fault.
The announcement, published this week in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, follows a recent rash of almost 200 small earthquakes at the Southern California inland sea and heightened concerns about the “Big One.”
Valerie Sahakian, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey and lead author of the study, said the newly named Salton Trough Fault has no connection to the recent quake swarm and the timing of the announcement is coincidental.
The research was a joint effort by seismologists from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where Sahakian studied, and UNR.
