SAN DIEGO, California, June 23, 2006 (ENS) - A researcher investigating California's San Andreas Fault finds the fault's southern, highly populated section has been stressed to a level sufficient for the "next big one," an earthquake of magnitude seven or greater.

Yuri Fialko of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego says her new study shows that the risk of a large earthquake in this region may be increasing faster than researchers had believed previously.

"For the public the most important result of this study is that these data show definitively that the fault is a significant seismic hazard and is primed for another big earthquake," said Fialko, an associate professor at the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Scripps.

Historical records show that the San Andreas Fault experienced massive earthquakes in 1857 at its central section and in 1906 at its northern segment - the San Francisco earthquake.

The southern section of the fault, however, has not seen a similar rupture in at least 300 years.

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