Faults along Nevada-California border capable of causing major earthquakes, study finds

Half a dozen seismic faults along the Nevada-California border — including two within 60 miles of Reno and one about 100 miles from Las Vegas — appear primed to unleash a moderate to major earthquake, according to a new study.

A pair of scientists from Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, examined the behavior of a system of active faults east of the Sierra Nevada range in California over more than 1,400 years.

They found that six of those faults, from California’s Death Valley National Park in the south to Nevada’s Pyramid Lake in the north, now carry an estimated stress load high enough to trigger an earthquake of magnitude 7.0 or greater.

The study by Alessandro Verdecchia and Sara Carena appears in the July edition of “Tectonics,” a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

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