It was followed by a magnitude 4.3<\/a> that ruptured at 9:40 a.m. Monday, with an epicenter in the Mojave Desert, roughly halfway between the towns of Ridgecrest and California City. Weak shaking was felt as far away as Los Angeles, Victorville and the Santa Clarita, San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys.<\/p>\n The Frazier Park earthquake \u201cwas probably on the San Andreas,\u201d said Kate Scharer, a USGS geologist. A magnitude 4.1 earthquake, however, is fairly small, the kind where people might feel \u201ca little wiggle,\u201d she added. <\/p>\n An earthquake centered near Frazier Park was felt across the region.<\/p>\n The epicenter of that quake sits at the intersection of the San Andreas and Garlock faults. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the intersection of the two biggest faults in the state, and there\u2019s a lot of questions of about about how that area actually behaves,\u201d said Julian Lozos, associate professor of geological sciences at Cal State Northridge. <\/p>\n The southern San Andreas fault, which stretches from Monterey County through Los Angeles County and the Inland Empire to the Salton Sea near the Mexican border, is capable of a catastrophic quake, with some experts theorizing a magnitude 8.2<\/a> temblor is possible if the entire stretch ruptures. A powerful earthquake on this roughly 300-mile span would cause the worst shaking the Southern California region has felt since 1857 and send destructive tremors through Los Angeles and beyond.<\/p>\n The 160-mile Garlock fault<\/a> is less well known, but capable of producing a magnitude 8 earthquake, experts have said. A large quake there has the potential to send strong shaking to the San Fernando Valley, Santa Clarita, Lancaster, Palmdale, Ventura, Oxnard, Bakersfield and Kern County, one of the nation\u2019s most productive regions for agriculture and oil production.<\/p>\n The two faults also have the potential to interact with each other \u2014 as a major quake on the Garlock fault could destabilize the San Andreas. <\/p>\n Monday\u2019s Mojave Desert quake was just south of the Garlock fault, Lozos said. <\/p>\n A magnitude 4.3 earthquake in the Mojave Desert on Monday was felt across the region.<\/p>\n The two earthquakes are not unusual for California, and neither was it unusual for people in the L.A. Basin to feel them. The quakes don\u2019t provide any hints of the exact timing or location of the next destructive temblor that will hit urban Southern California. <\/p>\n But the quakes are a reminder to be prepared, and that earthquakes in the Mojave Desert are capable of affecting seismic stress on the San Andreas fault. <\/p>\n \u201cWhenever there\u2019s a bigger earthquake out there, I mean, there\u2019s always a concern of what it\u2019s going to do to nearby faults like the San Andreas,\u201d Lozos said. <\/p>\n The recent mild quakes, he said, are \u201cjust a good reminder that we are on an active plate boundary with a lot of faults.\u201d Earthquakes with modest magnitudes in the 4.0 range are strong enough that \u201cpeople are going to notice it and talk about it.\u201d<\/p>\n These two quakes are \u201cprobably not big enough to cause a bigger thing, but it\u2019s a sign to check that you\u2019re prepared for when we inevitably do get a bigger thing,\u201d Lozos said. <\/p>\n There\u2019s a 60% chance of a magnitude 6.7 or greater earthquake striking the Los Angeles region by 2045, according to USGS estimates published in 2015<\/a>. <\/p>\n The largest temblor to hit Southern California in recent memory was the magnitude 7.1 Ridgecrest earthquake<\/a>, which hit at 8:19 p.m. on July 5, 2019. It caused damage in the town of Ridgecrest and was estimated to have caused billions of dollars in damage to the remote Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, the Navy\u2019s largest base for developing and testing weapons of warfare. <\/p>\n![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1783991291_928_.jpeg\")
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