The California coast has been rocked by a third earthquake in less than a day.
The United States Geological Survey says the state experienced a 2.7 magnitude quake at 8:03 am ET Thursday in the city of Hayward.
Two more earthquakes struck less than six hours earlier roughly 250 miles north, off the coast of Petrolia, California.
USGS says the first tremor struck at 2:06 am ET and measured 3.3 on the Richter scale.
It was quickly followed by a second 3.4 magnitude quake less than three hours later at 4:51 am ET.
The two earlier earthquakes were centered roughly 20 miles apart from each other off the California coast.
While the two quakes near Petrolia struck a relatively quiet part of northern California, the third quake in Hayward hit an area of the state right in between major cities like San Francisco, Oakland, and Fremont.
That 2.7 magnitude quake occurred right by the aptly named Hayward fault line, which USGS notes is an active fault in the San Francisco Bay region.
The first two earthquakes struck near the northern California coast (top left) while the third (in blue) was centered in the San Francisco Bay area
The USGS reports that 3 earthquakes have struck the California coast since 2 am ET on Thursday
The two magnitude-3 quakes near Petrolia took place near the northern portion of the infamous San Andreas fault, a major fracture in the Earth’s crust that spans 800 miles up and down California.
The first two seismic events also occurred right along the border of the Pacific plate – the oceanic tectonic plate that lies beneath the Pacific Ocean.
It is the biggest tectonic plate on Earth, and recent studies have suggested that large undersea faults may be pulling it apart.
A 2024 study in Geophysical Research Letters found that the deep underwater faults are the result of enormous forces within the Pacific plate dragging it westward.
The San Andreas fault line also sits just miles away from the Hayward fault, with San Francisco located in between both fractures.
Experts have warned that California is overdue for another massive earthquake along the San Andreas.
A potential magnitude 8 quake would wreak havoc upon the state’s most populated cities, causing roughly 1,800 deaths, 50,000 injuries, and $200 billion in damage, according to estimates by the California Earthquake Authority.
Experts are ‘fairly confident that there could be a pretty large earthquake at some point in the next 30 years,’ Angie Lux, project scientist for Earthquake Early Warning at the Berkeley Seismology Lab, told DailyMail.com in 2024.
