Southern California tickled by tiny tremors every 3 minutes

WASHINGTON (AP) — There’s a whole lot of shakin’ going on in Southern California — 10 times more than seismologists had thought.

But most of those earthquakes are so tiny that no one feels them.

Using a more accurate way of finding teeny tiny earthquakes, scientists counted 1.8 million of the temblors in Southern California from 2008 to 2017. The current catalog of quakes for the area has just under 180,000 for that decade.

Study lead author Zachary Ross, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology, says he hopes the smaller quakes will help better understand the bigger and more dangerous ones.

The study is in Thursday’s journal Science.