By Katherine Kornei
![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/20061b_4a46eae388b44f418bd960e794e9b4b0~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_61,h_40,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/20061b_4a46eae388b44f418bd960e794e9b4b0~mv2.png)
At 10:33 a.m. local time on 4 July 2019, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck California’s Mojave Desert near Ridgecrest (population 28,000). The next day, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake—roughly 11 times more powerful—occurred at 8:19 p.m. on a different fault in the same area.
“This was a unique set of events,” said Abhijit Ghosh, a seismologist at the University of California, Riverside. Usually, there’s one large earthquake followed by smaller aftershocks, he said... Read more