Why Redding has earthquakes: Here's what happens in Shasta Cascade region
The culprit is also responsible for much of what makes the North State a beautiful place to live: It's volcanoes.
Redding residents occasionally feel reverberations from strong quakes off the Humboldt County coast, like the strong (7.0) temblor that rocked towns south of Eureka to the Bay Area on Dec. 5, 2024. But small temblors that jiggle Redding — earthquakes that may feel different from ones on the coast, come from deep in the Earth's crust below the city, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Here's what's happening, scientists say, and what makes Redding's earthquakes different than temblors on California's North Coast.
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Temblors under Redding strong enough for people to feel don't happen often, but they're normal, said Paul Caruso, a geophysicist with the USGS Earthquake Center.
That's because tectonic plates stacked to the west of Shasta County are moving in opposite directions. 'The Gorda Plate is being pushed under California and Oregon,' under the North America plate on which Redding and the North State sit, Caruso said.
As the Gorda Plate moves through the Earth's crust, it melts against the mantle. That's why we have Mt. Shasta, Lassen Peak and other volcanoes further inland, Caruso said. That melting makes those areas unstable, and volcanoes form.
Shasta County residents often describe local earthquakes as small but loud. Some say Redding quakes imitate the sound of a small explosion.
They may also describe a feeling of free falling or jerking during a Redding quake, while people in Eureka may experience longer earthquakes that feel like the ground is rolling.
'It depends which side of the fault you're on,' Caruso said. Jolting quakes, like those described in Redding, 'are more related to thrust events,' like when one plate pushes another up or down.
More: Small earthquake shakes Redding Friday morning. Epicenter east of Whiskeytown
No, but we know they're coming, Caruso said.
Shasta and Siskiyou counties are part of the Shasta Cascade region, classified by the USGS as a moderate earthquake hazard area. That means there aren't frequent earthquakes strong enough for people to feel them, but the area does get shaken occasionally.
The North State is always on the move. The Gorda Plate is moving east, and the North American plate is carrying Redding, Yreka, Mount Shasta and everything west of the Sierra Nevada farther west, according to geologists.
More: Why Humboldt's coast gets major earthquakes. Could they happen in Shasta Cascade region?
Scientists can study earthquake likelihood by recording the history of earthquakes in a location, mapping fault lines and measuring ground temperatures and shifts; but they don't know when the next earthquake will happen.
'We know we're going to have more earthquakes (in Redding), but they're not predictable,' Caruso said.
Humboldt County has a lot of earthquakes because three tectonic plates come together near the Eel River, about 20 miles southwest of Eureka, according to Randy Reed, earth science professor at Shasta College in Redding.
Earthquakes like the strong December 2024 quake happen along the Mendocino Fracture Zone, a horizontal line that juts west into the Pacific Ocean, according to NOAA, and the beginning of the San Andreas Fault.
Most earthquake activity happens at the Mendocino Triple Junction near the coast, the point where the Gorda, North American and the Pacific plates come together, Reed said. That's the reason the coast gets stronger earthquakes.
'The bigger the earthquake, the longer the shake,' Caruso said.
Jessica Skropanic is a features reporter for the Record Searchlight/USA Today Network. She covers science, arts, social issues and news stories. Follow her on Twitter @RS_JSkropanic and on Facebook. Join Jessica in the Get Out! Nor Cal recreation Facebook group. To support and sustain this work, please subscribe today. Thank you.
This article originally appeared on Redding Record Searchlight: Earthquakes in Redding: What causes them in Shasta Cascade region?
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Accenture, SRI, the University of Washington and NOAA didn't directly respond to questions about the events. Wanser of SilverLining said in an email that the San Francisco meeting "was completely separate" from the cloud brightening program, even though it included many of the same researchers. The following afternoon, team members and Accenture executives planned to give a sprayer demonstration to Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune and board chair of the think tanks Third Way and the Breakthrough Institute, and Michael Brune, a former executive director of the Sierra Club, according to another scheduling document. It was an important moment for the team. The same technology that was being tested on the aircraft carrier's deck would also be deployed in the much larger open-ocean experiment, the research plan shows. "I was impressed with the team that was putting it together," Brune said in an interview. He attended the demo as an adviser to Larson, the crypto entrepreneur who has donated to SilverLining via the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Brune, who lives in Alameda, said he wasn't aware of the larger experiment until E&E News contacted him. "The engagement with leaders here in Alameda was subpar, and the controversy was pretty predictable," he added. In May 2024, city officials halted the experiment after complaining about the secrecy surrounding it. They also accused the organizers of violating the Hornet's lease, which was only intended to allow museum-related activities. (The Hornet didn't respond to a request for comment.) At a city council meeting the following month, Mayor Ashcraft said she wanted "a deeper understanding of the unintended consequences … not just of this small-scale experiment, but of the science, of this technology [and] where it's leading to." Then she and the other four council members voted unanimously to block the program from resuming its experiment. Between April 2024 and the city council's vote that June, the research team scrambled to limit public backlash against the test. By then, the controversy had attracted national and local media attention. The information request from E&E News sought roughly 14 months of text messages from or to Doherty and Robert Wood, another University of Washington researcher, that included or mentioned their collaborators at SilverLining or SRI. Some of the text messages that were shared by the university did not specify the sender, and Doherty and Wood did not respond to questions about them. In one text message chain on May 15, 2024, one person suggested SilverLining would pay to keep the Hornet museum closed when the tests were running "to give us some breathing space." The sender added, "for risk management and the project [it's] an easy call, and we can cover it." But an unidentified second person responded that "the community could actually find it additionally problematic that the project kept the Hornet shut down." The team members sent each other letters from people who supported the program, including one from science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, whose 2020 novel Ministry of the Future featured a rogue nation that unilaterally implemented planetary-scale solar geoengineering. "The truth is that in the coming decades we are going to have to cope with climate change in many ways involving both technologies and social decisions," he wrote to the city council on May 29, 2024. The Alameda experiment "has the advantage of exploring a mitigation method that is potentially very significant, while also being localized, modular, and reversible. These are qualities that aren't often attributed to geoengineering." After the council vote, SilverLining hired a new public relations firm, Berlin Rosen, to handle the media attention. It also discussed organizing local events to recruit potential allies, emails show. Wanser, SilverLining's executive director, wrote in a June 6, 2024, email to the research team that the program was considering "another run at a proposal to the city post-election, with, hopefully, a build up of local support and education in the interim." Ashcraft, the mayor, said in an email to E&E News that she is "not aware of any additional outreach with the community" by the researchers, adding that they hadn't engaged with her or city staff since the vote. Meanwhile, even before Trump returned to office, the team had begun acknowledging that its mistakes in Alameda had decreased the likelihood of gaining government support for solar geoengineering research. Access to federal aircraft "isn't going to happen any time soon," Doherty, the program director, wrote to Wanser and other team members on June 14, 2024. 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