The most recent quake hit at 8.19pm local time on Friday, 11 miles from Ridgecrest in the Mojave Desert, which was the site of Thursday's 6.4-magnitude quake. Dr Lucy Jones, a seismologist with the California Institute of Technology, warned that Friday's tremor was part of the sequence that produced the earlier quake, saying Thursday's was a ‘foreshock’.
Dr Jones warned there was about a 10% chance another 7.0-magnitude quake could hit in the next week, and that the chance of a 5.0-magnitude tremor was ‘approaching certainty’. Offices in downtown Los Angeles shook for around 30 seconds on Friday, and the quake was also felt in the Hollywood Hills, Las Vegas and parts of Mexico. The earthquake is the strongest to hit the region in 20 years.
On shakey ground