Until recently, tales about the earthquake that will separate California from the rest of the United States have seemed like the stuff of movie fiction - yet NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab seems to think that it could be a real possibilty.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), based out of Pasadena, announced that they predict that there is a shocking 99.9-percent chance that a 5.0 magnitude earthquake that will shake the streets of Los Angeles within the next two-and-a-half years, according to Tech Times.
JPL has been using radar and GPS devices to weigh the chances of how big the earthquake will be and how devastating it might be. The study involved eight scientists, with Dr. Andrea Donnellan leading the team.
"We didn't do a prediction. We were looking at the elastic energy stored in the crust," said Donnellan, explaining what the GPS and radar devices showed JPL. "It's like silly putty. If you pull it, it stretches, and then it breaks. The Earth behaves the same way," according to ABC 13.
"When the La Habra earthquake happened, it was relieving some of that stress, and it actually shook some of the upper sediments in the LA basin and moved those a little bit more," Donellan said, according to CBS Los Angeles.
Their study has shown them that the earthquake could be 60 miles off the 2014 quake, but there isn't any definitive answer on exactly which fault line would be struck.
However, the seismologists at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) have prepared their own versions of the same study, and based on their information it is an 85-percent chance that there will be an earthquake would be between a magnitude 5.0 or 6.0 within three years.
"The area - a 100 km radius circle centered on the city of La Habra - is a known seismically active area. For this same area, the community developed and accepted model of earthquake occurrence, 'UCERF3,' which is the basis of the USGS National Seismic Hazard Maps, gives a three-year probability of 85 percent," the USGS said. "In other words, the accepted random chance of an M5 or greater in this area in three years is 85 percent, independent of the analysis in this paper."
