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People overlook downtown San Francisco as fires roar across the city after the 1906 earthquake. This quake was likely a magnitude 7.9 and ruptured 296 miles (476 kilometers) along the San Andreas fault.
Credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty
▼ Northern California's Hayward Fault is often called the most dangerous fault in America: It's the country's most urbanized fault, meaning an earthquake there has the potential to cause significant destruction, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.Geologists say earthquakes happen there about every 160 years, and the last big quake on the fault happened 150 years ago, in 1868.Meaning we're due.
But are we, really? How accurately can researchers predict when an earthquake is expected to strike?
The answer is less straightforward than many people might think. Forecasting an earthquake's approximate date assumes earthquakes follow some kind of pattern — that faults release pressure in a predictable way. But the more scientists look at faults, the less this seems to be true. In fact, most experts now say it's impossible to guess where the next "big one" will occur.
"[In] some places, the Earth might be well enough organized that we get this more or less regular behavior, and in other parts, it's completely random," said William Ellsworth, a geophysicist at Stanford University who has spent decades looking for patterns in faultsthat might help engineers prepare for the big one. "It gets messy once you move away from these simple, well-behaved parts of the fault." (▪ ▪ ▪)
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