Southern California’s section of the San Andreas fault is “locked, loaded and ready to roll,” a leading earthquake scientist said Wednesday at the National Earthquake Conference in Long Beach.

The 90-mile creeping section between San Juan Bautista and Parkfield hasn’t seen a big earthquake in the modern record. Scientists are intrigued.

In the meantime, areas north of Los Angeles may be long overdue for a whopper of a quake along a portion of the San Andreas fault, according to a second study, this from the U.S. Geological Survey.

It has been about three centuries since the last great earthquake on the southern San Andreas Fault, the most treacherous seismic hazard in California. For decades researchers have puzzled over ...

The San Andreas is strike-slip fault, in which opposing blocks of rocks slide past each other horizontally. A big San Andreas quake can spark fires and other mayhem, but it can't displace water ...

Scientists have pinpointed a long-overlooked portion of the southern San Andreas Fault that they say could pose the most significant earthquake risk for the Greater Los Angeles area.

The San Andreas is the state's longest fault and perhaps its most famous—well-known enough to be the standalone title of a recent disaster film. And, says the LA Times, citing an earthquake ...

But the San Andreas Fault has about 150 miles (241 km) of slip between either side, meaning that volcanic rocks in Pinnacles National Park match those much farther south, in Los Angeles County.

About 60 miles (97 kilometers) north of Los Angeles, in a little mountain town called Gorman, the San Andreas Fault collides with the Garlock Fault, which then heads east into the Mojave Desert.

This segment of the San Andreas Fault, in Palmdale, California, lies about 60 miles (100 km) northwest of Los Angeles. The image was captured from the Space Shuttle Endeavor on Feb. 11, 2000. SAN ...

"The San Andreas fault in southern California last had a major quake in 1857 (magnitude 7.9)," explains Robert Graves, a Research Geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in an email ...