You can see fault lines throughout the Las Vegas Valley – along Decatur Boulevard, near Frenchman Mountain, and over by Cashman Field, just to name a few. Along strike-slip faults the rocks across the fault move horizontally past each other. Along normal faults rocks above the fault move down relative to those below the fault. Two types of faults are common in Southern Nevada: normal and strike slip. We don’t believe the recent earthquakes impact our hazard locally. Faults in Death Valley, particularly, pose a significant hazard to our community. Nevada has dozens of active faults, but, like we learned last week, an active fault more than 100 miles outside the Las Vegas Valley could also shake the area. How many earthquake faults are in Nevada, and should we be worried? It is possible for this condition to amplify the earthquake waves, a phenomenon you may see referred to as the basin effect. the basin) may shake like a bowl of gelatin with the bowl being the bedrock and the gelatin being the soft sediments. The Las Vegas Valley is bounded by hard bed rock and is filled with softer sediments. Harder or stiffer ground will shake less than softer materials. Generally, the earthquake waves that travel through the earth diminish with distance from the earthquake source area. The amount of ground shaking from an earthquake relates to its magnitude and the distance from the epicenter – the larger the magnitude, the greater the shaking. The early July earthquakes were more than 100 miles away in Southern California. The Reno-Carson City corridor has a higher hazard than the Las Vegas metropolitan area because the faults there have more frequent earthquakes however, the risk is higher in the Las Vegas Valley because the area has more buildings and infrastructure that could be damaged. In earthquake geology, a hazard is a source of potential harm or adverse effect and risk is the combination of the likelihood of the occurrence of a harm and the severity of that harm, which includes economic losses. In some cases, interactions between plates along the boundary cause them to deform and trigger earthquakes that can be felt for hundreds of miles. The San Andreas fault – which stretches for roughly 750 miles in California – is the boundary between the North American and Pacific plates. At a plate boundary, two plates move relative to each other, and this movement can cause earthquakes. The earth’s outer layer, or shell, is broken into pieces called plates. The earthquake faults in Nevada and Utah are considered intraplate faults, which means they’re located fairly near but not at a plate boundary. Many locals are surprised to find out that the earthquake risk is real in Nevada. Taylor and colleagues are now researching the Las Vegas Valley’s sediments and their relation to faults in and around Southern Nevada – work that may help them determine which of our half dozen or so active faults pose the biggest risk. We asked UNLV geoscientist Wanda Taylor, who has been investigating this topic for decades. Just how big is Southern Nevada’s earthquake risk, why did we feel the California quakes from more than 150 miles away, and how can we best prepare for future events? Many of the town’s structures were damaged, though thankfully no one was seriously injured. But when two early July SoCal temblors rippled through Southern Nevada, they left many local residents shaken up and looking for answers.įew in the Las Vegas Valley realize that Nevada is the nation’s third-most seismically active state – behind California and Alaska – with active faults statewide capable of “the big one.” The last major quake with an epicenter in Nevada was a 6.0 magnitude event in 2008 in the small community of Wells. The unpredictability of earthquakes is a jarring yet expected part of life for California residents.
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