For more than a decade, scientists at Scripps Institution of
Oceanography at UC San Diego have been unraveling the history of
fault ruptures below the cobalt blue waters of Lake Tahoe one
earthquake at a time. Two new studies by the Scripps research
team offer a more comprehensive analysis of earthquake activity
in the Lake Tahoe region, which suggest a magnitude-7 earthquake
occurs every 2,000 to 3,000 years in the basin, and that the
largest fault in the basin, West Tahoe, appears to have last
ruptured between 4,100 and 4,500 years ago. These studies, led
by a team of Scripps researchers including Graham Kent, Neal
Driscoll, Jeff Babcock and Alistair Harding, collected new data
on earthquake history along three active faults in the region.
These new data suggest that the most recent ruptures along the
West Tahoe and Incline Village faults each produced nearly
4-meter-high offsets. The most recent event along the Incline
Village Fault occurred about 575 years ago. "These studies taken
together show that the