The Whittier Fault is a

geologic fault In geology, a fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock across which there has been significant displacement as a result of rock-mass movements. Large faults within Earth's crust result from the action of plate tectonic ...

located in eastern

Los Angeles County Los Angeles County, officially the County of Los Angeles and sometimes abbreviated as LA County, is the most populous county in the United States, with 9,663,345 residents estimated in 2023. Its population is greater than that of 40 individua ...

Southern California Southern California (commonly shortened to SoCal) is a geographic and Cultural area, cultural List of regions of California, region that generally comprises the southern portion of the U.S. state of California. Its densely populated coastal reg ...

, that is one of the two upper branches of the Elsinore Fault Zone, with the Chino Fault the second.

Geology

The Whittier Fault is a right-lateral strike-slip fault that runs along the Chino Hills range between the cities of Chino Hills and Whittier. The fault has a slip rate of per year. It is estimated that this fault could generate a quake of 6.0–7.2 on the

moment magnitude scale The moment magnitude scale (MMS; denoted explicitly with or Mwg, and generally implied with use of a single M for magnitude) is a measure of an earthquake's magnitude ("size" or strength) based on its seismic moment. was defined in a 1979 paper ...

References

* Seismic faults of California Strike-slip faults Geology of Los Angeles County, California Geology of Orange County, California Geology of Riverside County, California Geography of the San Gabriel Valley Chino Hills (California) Whittier, California {{struct-geology-stub

Geology

See also

References