Is it true that there is goiing to be a giant earthquake that los angeles is going to be an island?

Question

thats what my teacher said what do you guys hink??

Answer 1

I have found nothing indicating that Los Angeles was expected to become an island, although, the USGS has come up with a scenario for the "Big One", which is still disastrous.  This is not a prediction, but a scenario to use in planning emergency response.

Many of us breathed a little easier after October 17, 1989. The Loma Prieta earthquake, 7.1 on the Richter scale, meant that the big one, talked about for decades, had finally happened. And, bad as it was, we had survived.

There are two things wrong with that. First, Loma Prieta was not the big one. It was a moderately big one, certainly destructive to some parts of the Bay Area, but nowhere near the size of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Second, having an earthquake like Loma Prieta has little to do with the likelihood of having another one on a different fault, somewhere else in the area.

The inevitability of a damaging earthquake still confronts everybody in the Bay Area, and we still risk substantial damage. A new study, released in 2003 by the United States Geological Survey, says that there is a 62 percent chance of a M>=6.7 earthquake during the next 30 years and that the quake could strike at any time, including today. In other words, scientists think that a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake is nearly twice as likely to happen as not to happen.

The San Andreas and neighboring faults near Los Angeles interact in surprising, and, in some cases, potentially dangerous ways, according to an article by U.S. Geological Survey scientists to be published in the Dec. 12, 2003, issue of the journal Science. The researchers reviewed lessons from past earthquakes and combined that with powerful computer modeling to reach their conclusions.

Previous research has shown that faults like those in southern California interact over a variety of time scales, from sequences of large earthquakes over many years to cascading ruptures during a single big event.

Greg Anderson, the USGS scientist who is the lead author on the paper, noted that the 2002 magnitude 7.9 Denali Fault, Alaska, earthquake was just such a cascading rupture. As described in an earlier Science paper by Donna Eberhart-Phillips and colleagues, it began with a magnitude 7.2 earthquake on the Susitna Glacier fault, a previously unknown thrust fault, which immediately triggered magnitude 7.3 and 7.6 events on the strike-slip Denali fault. In turn, these set off smaller slip on the strike-slip Totschunda fault.

The densely populated Los Angeles metropolitan region is bounded by a large network of thrust and strike-slip faults similar to the Denali complex. The similarity between the Los Angeles faults and those involved in the 2002 Denali Fault event raises two questions that the authors addressed, said Anderson: Could large, complex earthquakes like the Denali Fault event happen on the edge of the Los Angeles metropolitan area? Or could these faults trigger each other more slowly, in a sequence of smaller, but still dangerous events?

Under certain very rare circumstances, a large earthquake on the northern San Jacinto fault near Riverside and San Bernardino could trigger a cascading rupture of the Sierra Madre-Cucamonga fault system, potentially causing a magnitude 7.5-7.8 earthquake on the edge of the Los Angeles metropolitan region. The faults involved are close to the densely populated Los Angeles, Riverside, and San Bernardino areas, and the shaking and damage from such an event could possibly exceed even those of the ``Big One’’ on the San Andreas fault.

In imagining the next "Big One," scientists considered the section of the San Andreas loaded with the most stored energy and the most primed to break. Most agree it's the southernmost segment, which has not popped since 1690, when it unleashed an estimated 7.7 jolt.

Answer 2

Yes it is very likely.

If there is a big enough earth-quake (and it is more of 'when' not 'if' ) the land will grind together, crumble, split and cave-in along the fault.

Then it will fill with water from the surrounding ocean, forming an island along the fault-line.. there was a movie about this too, set in the future and i think the island was used as a place they'd throw the rejects...just like australia!!

Answer 3

Due to plate tectonics, certain parts of California will eventually separate from the mainland. This will take millions of years.

It isn't likely that an earthquake will do this since in this particular region the plates are moving north-south and grinding against each other, not pulling apart.

Answer 4

Yes, we will ultimately have a large quake in the Southern California area, because we are located at the boundary between the Pacific plate and the North America plate (the San Andreas fault).

That said, when and how large are a mystery. No reliable method of prediction exists. Large quake intervals on this fault are around 120-140 years by some estimates, but nobody can tell when it will come.

There are hundreds of other, smaller faults in the region too. Any of them can slip from time to time.

Opinions are split about whether or not these faults will continue to let off small amounts of energy as they have been), or save up for the "Big One." The San Andreas has a snag along its Southern reach, and some believe that this holds the fault slippage to small bits, but if it goes, we could have a huge quake.

Regarding becoming an island, that is complete conjecture. The fault would have to open up enough to allow the Pacific Ocean to flow up and create a breach between the land masses. But faults don't spread by miles; so the thought of California "drifting off" is inaccurate.

As always, the best route is to have enough food, water and other supplies to support yourself for a few weeks in the event of a calamity.

Answer 5

yea about the earthquake