Earthquake season! It's that time of year, I guess. Seems just a year or two ago there was a sizable one same time frame, right around Easter, centered more towards Mexicali. Had some good pictures of that one with the road split and the dust shaking off the mountains. Felt by quite a few folks.
Three of us felt it. We were sitting on our balcony on 12th floor of Sonoran Sky. Felt like rapid bumping up and down followed by a rolling, wavy feeling. Didn't last very long. A friends in another condo there said her window curtains swayed.
There is an earthquake monitoring site in Cholla, about 300-400 yards from the western end of Pinto Pt. on the old bear trail.
There has been one there for many years.
There is a fault line that runs close (or through) Rocky Point and down the middle of the Sea of Cortez.
http://www.sci.sdsu.edu/salton/The%20Gulf%20of%20California.html In Pliocene time, about seven million years ago, a zone of separation developed on the East Pacific Rise. The future Baja California peninsula and a piece of future California were sheared from mainland Mexico along a lateral fault, possibly the ancestral San Andreas fault which was then, as now, oriented northwest-southeast. During this early period of development, movement was right lateral, with the sheared-off slab moving northwest, but always in close contact with the mainland.[1]
The northwest movement seems to have been repeated slippage along the principal members of the San Andreas fault system -- the Elsinore fault, the San Jacinto fault, and the main San Andreas strand itself.
About four million years ago, the San Andreas fault proceeded to play a key role in the next phase, the opening of the mouth of the Gulf of California. While the Baja California peninsula continued to move to the northwest as a whole, its southern end began to rotate westward, opening a seaway between the new peninsula and the mainland.
