Scientists issue warning of 'The Big One' predicted to be one of the most extreme earthquakes in history
If you can't bear to watch disaster movies due to them hitting a little too close to home, we'd advise you to avoid putting on 2012, San Andreas, The Impossible, and any of the numerous other earthquake movies.
Just weeks after a Russian megaquake triggered tsunamis and President Donald Trump issued warnings across several US states, there are more worrisome headlines about the next big natural disaster.
Supposed mystics like Baba Vanga and Nostradamus predicted a rough 2025, while Japan's version similarly foresaw a megathrust earthquake along the Nankai Trough.
A massive earthquake could soon be hitting the USA, with scientists warning about 'The Big One' potentially coming from California's San Andreas Fault.
What is 'The Big One' earthquake?
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A team from Pasadena's Caltech delved deeper into March 2025's 7.7–magnitude earthquake that hit Myanmar along the Sagaing Fault. With the Sagaing Fault being comparable to the San Andreas Fault, scientists are predicting how things could play out in a similar way. The Myanmar earthquake struck on March 28, killing more than 5,400 people and injuring over 11,400.
Caltech's researchers used satellite imagery of the Sagaing Fault to try and figure out how the quake happened and whether a similar scenario could realistically happen in California.
The findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with lead author Solène Antoine explaining: "This earthquake turned out to be an ideal case to apply image correlation methods that were developed by our research group.
"They allow us to measure ground displacements at the fault, where the alternative method, radar interferometry, is blind due to phenomenon like decorrelation [a process to decouple signals] and limited sensitivity to north–south displacements."
Past tremors from the Sagaing Fault suggested that the Myanmar earthquake would cover a 300-kilometer stretch where there hadn't been an earthquake since 1839.
Worringly, the satellite imagery showed how it actually occurred on a 500km section, with this area shifting by a jaw-dropping 9.8ft.
The future of 'The Big One' earthquake
Jean–Philippe Avouac, co–author of the study, added: "Future earthquakes might not simply repeat past known earthquakes.
"Successive ruptures of a given fault, even as simple as the Sagaing or the San Andreas faults, can be very different and can release even more than the deficit of slip since the last event."
Avouac admitted that historical records are typically too short to create statistical models that can monitor eventual patterns.
As for the San Andreas Fault, there are questions about whether 'The Big One' would follow in the footsteps of 1857's 7.7 to 7.9-magnitude earthquake that split the fault from Monterey County through to Los Angeles County. Or, would it be modeled on 1906's 7.9 San Francisco earthquake that started out at sea and spread in different directions to Humboldt County and Santa Cruz County?
The 1906 incident killed 3,000 people and destroyed 80% of the city, but in terms of 'The Big One', we're told it could either end up as several smaller earthquakes or reach a colossal 8.0 on the Richter scale and tear the fault into San Bernardino, Riverside, and Imperial counties.
Avouac is trying to create a model for how the San Andreas Fault could behave in the future, but admits it's 'far more complex': "It's not going to come soon, because it's quite a heavy calculation."