SAN DIEGO - The power of a 7.0 magnitude earthquake shook Northern California Thursday morning. It led to a tsunami warning from San Francisco to Oregon, but it was canceled shortly after.
The quake, which hit just off the coast of Humboldt County, led to a tsunami warning.
"Basically the sea floor ruptured, and moved in a magnitude 7 earthquake," said Geology Professor Patrick Abbott with San Diego State University. "So the first thought is, if the sea floor is broken, broken by a fault movement, tsunami - is there a tsunami threat? So a magnitude 7 gets you on the kind of leading edge of where the tsunami might occur."
Northern California is on the San Andreas fault, making it prone to earthquake activity. Hundreds of miles south, Mission Beach and San Diego remained calm.
Abbott said your day-to-day experience at the beach doesn't reflect what a tsunami could look like. Typically when you're at the beach, waters come in, hit the ground, break and pull back, but tsunamis create a wall of water.
While there is a low probability of a tsunami in San Diego, Abbott said there doesn't mean there isn't a threat.
In 2010, a magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile, created a tsunami, and damaged millions of dollars in Shelter Island
Abbott said there are concrete barriers that will help offset the power of a tsunami in San Diego.
"For off shore, all those off shore islands that we have out there, Santa Catalina, San Clemente, Coronado islands, all those islands you see, those actually are nice barriers for a tsunami coming in, loses a lot of its energy against all those offshore islands and topography so that helps reduce the size of the threat we get here," said Abbott.
