Malibu Coast Fault

The quake on Tuesday morning happened to occur at a weird time. I'd already finished with our final check list of things to do before leaving in the afternoon for the Rush 30th Anniversary Tour concert at Hollywood Bowl (check this review for a good description of the show we saw, it was the first time we'd seen Rush in twenty years and yes indeed!, we had a great time). Among other things, we were bailing on the kids and expected them to deal with a few items all by themselves. So, I was damned nervous.

What initially appeared to be a precursor quake turned out to be yet one more rattle on a fault line which has lived for a long, long time. Good luck getting any of that out of the local media.

We live near 34.19, -118.84 and the quake was located at 34.06, -118.85. About nine miles away; mostly south, and just a wee bit west (once I found a way to map the distance). Sadly, with the demise of all the popular Geo based systems I had been using, I was wandering around aimlessly looking for way to do a decent distance mapping.

All the geography based systems seemed to die around March of this year... I've been wondering what to do with my GeoURL locator for quite some time. Even the semi commercial sites pulled everything. The only lat/long mapping system I've found that still provides useful maps is probably going to go away because I mentioned it. *sigh*

Oddly (ironically?), Vince Cronin of Baylor University (in Texas!) seems to be the online authority on the Malibu Coast Fault Zone. Looking at his historical data, quakes of this size have been happening for a long, long time with even longer durations (I'd give this last one 15 seconds or so, hard to tell how long it might have been 'real time'). The largest recent quake in the area seems to have been the Point Mugu Earthquake, 21 February 1973.