A swarm of over 90 small earthquakes, ranging in magnitude from 1.0 to 2.7, rattled Los Angeles County’s unincorporated Lennox and Westmont areas from 8:05 pm PDT on Friday through 2:30 pm PDT Saturday, the Los Angeles Times reports on a not-particularly common occurrence in the area.
Seismologists see the shaking as potentially the work of the Newport-Inglewood Fault Zone, a strike-slip fault that runs from Culver City to Newport Beach. While swarms like this aren’t necessarily a precursor to an actual large event – and might even just be the ground adjusting to abrupt changes in the weather, as there was a major rainstorm last week – ancient geological evidence indicates that the fault complex may have produced quakes ranging up to a magnitude of 7.5, with one shaking the area so hard that it sank a chunk of the coast into the ocean.