California mountains rise as groundwater depleted in state's Central Valley

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 14-May-2014
Contact: Robert Sanders
University of California - Berkeley
California mountains rise as groundwater depleted in state's Central Valley

Pumping for agriculture has raised Sierra Nevada mountain range 6 inches in 150 years

Winter rains and summer groundwater pumping in California's Central Valley make the Sierra Nevada and Coast Ranges sink and rise by a few millimeters each year, creating stress on the state's earthquake faults that could increase the risk of a quake.

Gradual depletion of the Central Valley aquifer because of groundwater pumping also raises these mountain ranges by a similar amount each year – about the thickness of a dime – with a cumulative rise over the past 150 years of up to 15 centimeters (6 inches), according to calculations by a team of geophysicists.

While the seasonal changes in the Central Valley aquifer have not yet been firmly associated with any earthquakes, studies have shown that similar levels of periodic stress, such as that caused by the motions of the moon and sun, increase the number of microquakes on the San Andreas Fault, which runs parallel to the mountain ranges. If these subtle seasonal load changes are capable of influencing the occurrence of microquakes, it is possible that they can sometimes also trigger a larger event, said Roland Bürgmann, UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley.

"The stress is very small, much less than you need to build up stress on a fault toward an earthquake, but in some circumstances such small stress changes can be the straw that broke the camel's back; it could just give that extra push to get a fault to fail," Bürgmann said.

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