The Los Angeles Basin and the Mojave Desert might be seismically linked, and that could explain why the urban region has experienced a 1,000-year lull in quakes while the desert has been quite active.

This claim from a new study might come as a surprise to L.A. residents, who have been shaken by the 1994 Northridge quake, the Whittier quake in 1987 and numerous other temblors big and small.

But even the Northridge quake, the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history at the time, was “a drop in the bucket” compared with the massive jolts expected during high seismic activity, said researcher James Dolan of the University of Southern California.

 Source : Live Science