Large earthquakes are typically followed by smaller aftershocks. But particularly intense events can also alter stress on nearby faults or along the same fault, triggering another major earthquake.
The Venezuelan sequence also reinforces an emerging consensus among seismologists: that treating faults as isolated structures may underestimate the destructive power of quakes in regions where multiple tectonic faults meet, as they do both in Venezuela and around California's San Andreas Fault system. That's a problem, because many of the seismic hazard models in California do not account for those multi-fault interactions.
Despite these similarities, researchers caution that the two systems differ in important ways.
The difference stems largely from the Maracaibo block, whose interaction with surrounding faults creates a much more intricate plate boundary than California's.
In Venezuela, the tectonic plates move past each other at about 0.8 inches (20 millimeters) per year, compared with roughly 1.2 inches (30 millimeters) along the San Andreas Fault. Faster plate motion allows tectonic stress to accumulate more quickly, which influences how often large earthquakes occur over long timescales, but not when the next one will strike.
An aerial view of the San Andreas Fault in California. (Image credit: Kevin Schafer/Getty Images)However, these are statistical averages. The recurrence of large earthquakes is highly irregular and depends on a multitude of factors, many of which we still don't fully understand. So a major event could occur in 100 years — or even tomorrow.
Looking beyond individual faults
"It is the kind of natural event that can sharpen and test the rupture-interaction concepts that paleoseismic models like ours can only infer indirectly," said Liliane Burkhard, a geologist and geophysicist at the University of Bern and first author of a recent study suggesting that the junction between the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults in Southern California is experiencing some of its highest tectonic stress levels in the past 1,000 years, told Live Science.
The Venezuela doublet offers exactly that opportunity. The main lesson for California, Burkhard said, is that interactions between neighboring faults can play an important role in the evolution of large earthquakes.
Many times the winner isn't the boxer who lands the hardest punch but the one who keeps punching for longer.
Still, the two systems are quite different. The Venezuelan sequence represents a different type of cascading rupture than the one described in Burkhard's research. At Cajon Pass, the "earthquake gate" concept explores whether a single rupture can jump from one fault system to another during the same earthquake, over tens of seconds of rupture propagation along a continuous fault trace. The Venezuelan doublet, by contrast, "looks like two distinct ruptures on what may be two separate fault structures, triggered in close succession," Burkhard said.
New Zealand has already incorporated this lesson. After the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake ruptured at least 12 faults in a single event, New Zealand revised its National Seismic Hazard Model to include complex multifault ruptures.
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Even so, researchers cautioned against drawing sweeping conclusions from a single earthquake.
"Each earthquake gives us one possible scenario," Judith Hubbard, an earthquake scientist and structural geologist at Cornell University told Live Science. "The range of earthquake behaviors is wide."
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