Magnitude 4.5 earthquake shakes southern Californians awake

The magnitude-4.5 earthquake occurred early Wednesday and was centered 2 miles north of Banning, about 85 miles east of Los Angeles.

|
US Geological Survey
The U.S. Geological Survey says the magnitude-4.5 jolt occurred at 6:42 a.m. Wednesday and was centered 2 miles north of Banning, about 85 miles east of Los Angeles.

A small earthquake gave an early morning wake-up call to the inland region of Southern California.

The U.S. Geological Survey says the magnitude-4.5 jolt occurred at 6:42 a.m. Wednesday and was centered 2 miles north of Banning, about 85 miles east of Los Angeles. The depth of the quake was 10 miles below the surface. 

The Riverside County Fire Department received no reports of problems from the quake.

USGS seismologist Lucy Jones says the area has a history of many quakes in the magnitude-4 range.

Banning is a small city along Interstate 10 in the San Gorgonio Pass between the San Bernardino and San Jacinto mountain ranges.

“We still call it small,” USGS seismologist Lucy Jones told The Los Angeles Times. “For those close to the quake it feels very strong, but there’s nothing in California that should be damaged at that level.”

It was the largest quake in the area since 1992 and was related to the San Andreas fault system, Jones said.

The San Andreas Fault is a place where two tectonic plates touch, the North American and Pacific Plates. The plates are rigid (or almost rigid) slabs of rock that comprise the crust and upper mantle of the Earth. The fault is about 700 miles long as the crow flies and about 800 miles long when its curves are measured. It is roughly ten miles deep, and reaches in the south from the Salton Sea in Imperial county to northern California's Cape Mendocino in Humboldt county, according SanAndreasFault.org

The San Andreas Fault is a "right lateral transform fault." This means that if two people face each other across the fault and it moves, each person will see the other person move to the right.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Magnitude 4.5 earthquake shakes southern Californians awake
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0106/Magnitude-4.5-earthquake-shakes-southern-Californians-awake
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe