A 4.0 magnitude Earthquake struck the Santa Ana Mountains in Orange County on Thursday morning in the middle of the Southern California Weather Force Earthquake Watch window.  There are some signs that point to further instability in the fault system and the watch remains in effect so read on for details …

Knowing the exact location of a quake is not possible, however the windows are set in place.  I haven’t really gone Earthquake Watch for anything over 4.0 in our local region in quite sometime and we still are considered in an Earthquake drought ever since the 1994 Northridge Quake.  So these are less common than before the 1990s.

I’ve been developing a pattern recognition algorithm over the years for stress in the region for Earthquakes. It’s a scale that a graph will be updated every 3 hours automatically on the website somewhere and it’ll use my algorithm to show stress fracture probability in the area.. meaning if it goes above a certain level then we are close to yet another fault-slip in the area … I’m not too far from releasing it.

This morning’s earthquake was on a reverse thrust fault in the Santa Ana Mountains.  That means the land shifted and sunk on each side of the fault at a diagonal angle.  This means that transfer was moved toward the East and West, with the west transfer being stronger.  Such areas to the west would be the Ventura, Los Angeles, and Orange County fault-zones, including the Chino/Whittier Fault, Newport Fault, Los Angeles Basin system, and the San Fernando to Northridge Fault areas.

Areas to the east would be the San Jacinto and San Andreas Fault-zone, including the southern section… a section many scientists say will go off between now and the next 28 years now.

Considering extending the Earthquake Watch through the weekend as this 4.0 magnitude quake was enough to disturb local fault systems within the Southern California Region.

Related alerts – Earthquake Watch Issued Earlier In The Week – Click Here

Stay tuned to Southern California Weather Force for further updates …

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