An alert went out in Southern California Friday about a 4.6 magnitude earthquake hitting northeast of San Diego.
The US Geological Survey (USGS) said on its website it had detected the quake around 10:26am PT (1:30pm ET) near Bombay Beach.
However, the USGS deleted the alert from its live map about two hours later and told DailyMail.com it is looking into the reason the false information was published.
Bombay Beach sits directly on the San Andreas Fault, which is one of the most significant and active fault lines in California.
There are heightened concerns about activity in the area because scientists have long warned the fault line could produce an 8 magnitude or higher quake known as the ‘Big One.’
The fault spans 800 miles from Cape Mendocino in the north to the Salton Sea in the south.
The ‘Big One’ would cause roughly 1,800 deaths, 50,000 injuries and $200 billion in damages, according to the Great California Shakeout.
California was rocked by a 4.6 magnitude earthquake just miles outside San Diego on Friday
The US Geological Survey (USGS) detected the quake around 10:26am PT (1:30pm ET) near Bombay Beach that sits northeast of San Diego
The last major earthquakes on the San Andreas fault were in 1857 and 1906.
Experts are ‘fairly confident that there could be a pretty large earthquake at some point [on San Andreas] in the next 30 years,’ Angie Lux, project scientist for Earthquake Early Warning at the Berkeley Seismology Lab, previously told DailyMail.com.
California has had more than 6,200 earthquakes of magnitudes up to 4.7 this year alone, according to Volcano Discovery.
Approximately four quakes were above magnitude 4 and around 5,800 were below magnitude 2.
The vast majority of earthquakes result from the constant movement of tectonic plates, which are massive, solid slabs of rock that make up the planetary surface and shift around on top of Earth’s mantle — the inner layer between the crust and core.
As the tectonic plates slowly move against each other, their edges can get stuck due to friction and stress will build along the edges.
When that stress overcomes the friction, the plates slip, causing a release of energy that travels in waves through the Earth’s crust and generates the shaking we feel at the surface.
