Coast along Humboldt County known for strong earthquakes over the years.
Many places in California are linked to a history of powerful earthquakes — San Francisco, struck in 1906 and again in 1989 with the rest of the Bay Area and Santa Cruz. Northridge near Los Angeles in 1994. The Monterey County town of Parkfield, dubbed the Earthquake Capital of the World.
Sarah Minson, a research geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Earthquake Science Center at Moffett Field in Mountain View, said the seismic activity is due to a mashup of tectonic plates in the earth’s crust. “This is actually a really interesting area with really high seismicity,” Minson said. “There’s an awful lot going on in that area.”, followed the next day by powerful 6.5 and 6.6 magnitude aftershocks. The strong shaking damaged buildings, roads and bridges and triggered landslides in many of the same small towns affected Tuesday — Ferndale, Fortuna, Petrolia, Rio Del and Scotia, the California Department of Conservation said.
She said strong aftershocks are a concern — by Tuesday afternoon there already had been about 80 aftershocks, the strongest magnitudes 4.6, 4 and 3.9 — and there’s a 13% chance of a magnitude 5 or greater striking in the near future.Despite the high potential for earthquakes, Minson said that unlike the Bay Area, the fault lines and earthquake epicenters along the Humboldt County coast tend to be far out to sea, lessening their severity.
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