An earthquake of the size that flattened Haiti will one day rock this region, but the result will be vastly different, scientists said in a published report..
As with the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, faults capable of triggering enormous quakes weave underground within 10 miles of this area's population centers, reported the North County Times.
"Almost all of the major earthquake faults in Southern California could produce a 7.0 magnitude earthquake," said David Oglesby, an earth sciences professor and seismologist at UC Riverside.
Those include the Elsinore Fault, which lies beneath Temecula, Murrieta, Wildomar and Lake Elsinore, and the Rose Canyon Fault just off the shores of Oceanside, Carlsbad, Encinitas, Solana Beach and Del Mar, Oglesby said in a telephone interview Thursday.
And a magnitude-7 quake would give rise to the potential for a tsunami to rake the North San Diego County coast ---- that is, if the temblor were to trigger an underwater landslide, said Neal Driscoll, a professor of geology at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
