May 07--It was an active seismic day in California, with small earthquakes rattling residents across Northern California and the Inland Empire on Wednesday morning.
Although conspiracy theories are tempting, earthquake experts said there's no reason to think they're connected.
Even the three quakes in Riverside County were too far apart to all be linked. The first two, a magnitude-3.7 and -2.7 that struck shortly after midnight, both were traced back to the San Jacinto fault zone. But the third temblor, a magnitude-3.1 near Corona at 9:11 a.m., occurred in a different fault zone.
Scientists are still studying the details of the third earthquake, which occurred near the Elsinore and Whittier faults, Caltech seismologist Jennifer Andrews said.
As for the first two, it seemed like business as usual for the San Jacinto fault zone, a major network of faults in Southern California.
"We see relatively small earthquakes [on the San Jacinto fault], but it's relatively active," Andrews said.
Hundreds of miles north, in California's East Bay area, three small earthquakes shook the Concord area Wednesday morning.
The first temblor, a magnitude-3.0, occurred at 7:01 a.m. Half an hour later, a magnitude-3.5 quake and a magnitude-2.6 quake hit within three minutes of each other, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The three quakes were centered about two miles from Pleasant Hill, four miles from Walnut Creek and 51 miles from Sacramento.
Farther up the state, a 3.3-magnitude earthquake struck the Redding area at 11:30 a.m. The epicenter was about five miles from Shasta Lake and 149 miles from Sacramento, according to the USGS.
UPDATE
6:45 p.m.: This post has been updated with the U.S. Geological Survey's revised magnitudes of the earthquakes near Concord.
This post was originally published at 4:00 p.m.
