Off you probably felt it. It was one of the
strongest earthquakes in a long time.
And it hit last night near Bakersfield that it turns
out it may have been on a fault that experts
didn't even know about.
In fact, the aftershocks are still happening.
We had another one just minutes ago.
KTLS Kimberly Chang is live outside the USGS office in
Pasadena.
Hi, Kim.
Micah, hi. You know, there are hundreds of fault lines
already mapped in our region,
and after last night's quake,
the data suggests that they may have just discovered a
new one.
Tuesday's magnitude 5.2 earthquake, centered about 15 miles southwest of
Lamont,
CA in Kern County, was big enough that people reported
shaking in Santa Clarita,
downtown Los Angeles, Santa Monica,
Long Beach and beyond. I felt something shake,
but I was like, I must just be the car.
I'm living in West LA,
it's just a little bit shaking.
I'm in Pasadena. I was thinking about whether it's need
to arrive.
They feel like it's not that strong.
The Templar causes large boulder to fall onto the freeway
in the back.
It triggered the state's early warning system,
sending an alert on many people's phones seconds before they
felt the shaking.
As of now, no one has been able to put
their finger on a fault.
And that means there's something,
something new to to learn here.
You heard right. We may have discovered a new fault
here.
Robert Degroote with USGS says there are hundreds of known
fault lines in the region,
giving experts a good idea of where earthquakes are likely
to happen.
But that doesn't mean there aren't surprises.
New discoveries are happening all the time.
Seismologist Dr. Lucy Jones says it's not unusual.
Most small earthquakes at this point are actually not on
our big named faults.
The epicenter of Tuesday's quake was miles from the White
Wolf Fault line,
where a deadly quake occurred in 1952.
It's very near where we had a magnitude 7.5 in
1952.
However, it does not appear to be on the same
fault as that earthquake.
That was the White Wolf fault,
which dips in a different direction.
And it doesn't look like this earthquake was associated with
any known fault.
De Groot says scientists will continue to collect and study
data.
There's still things that we need to understand about the
event itself,
where it was located, the nature of the ground that
it was in,
all of these different features that it might be connected
to other fault systems.
The bigger the earthquake is,
the more likely it is that you can actually see
the fault that will break all the way up to
the surface.
This earthquake is small enough that it's unlikely that it's
producing any sort of surface rupture,
and therefore we may never know exactly which fault it
was on.
And dozens of smaller quakes have been reported since last
night's earthquake.
No major injuries or damage has been reported in Pasadena.
Kimberly Chang, KTLA 5 News.