Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

Over the years, many people have been shown that someday a giant earthquake will cause significant portions of California to fall into the ocean. But up until now, most scientists have disputed the idea that this could ever actually happen. Well, now all of that has changed. According to a brand new study, a megaquake along the west coast “could plunge large parts of California into the sea almost instantly”. In fact, the researchers that conducted this study say that it is almost certain to happen eventually. Of course they probably don’t believe that such an event is imminent or else they would be moving out of the state like so many other people are.

When I came across news stories about this brand new study I was absolutely astounded. Here is a short excerpt from one of them…

The Big One may be overdue to hit California, but scientists near LA have found a new risk for the area during a major earthquake. They claim that if a major tremor hits the area, it could plunge large parts of California into the sea almost instantly. The discovery was made after studying the Newport-Inglewood fault, which has long been believed to be one of Southern California’s danger zones.

Could you imagine what such a catastrophe would do to our nation and how many lives would be lost if that were to happen today?

According to the study, a California megaquake would potentially cause some sections of southern California to suddenly drop by as much as 3 feet, and that could result in vast stretches of land “ending up at or below sea level”…

In total three quakes over the last 2,000 years on nearby faults made ground just outside Los Angeles city limits sink as much as 3ft. Today that could result in the area ending up at or below sea level, said Cal State Fullerton professor Matt Kirby, who worked with the paper´s lead author, graduate student Robert Leeper.

Wow.

And we are not talking about something that would happen over a period of weeks or months. According to these scientists, it would be a “very rapid sinking”…

“It’s not just a gradual sinking. This is boom — it would drop. It’s very rapid sinking,” Robert Leeper, lead author of a new study published in Nature, carried out with the help of the US Geological Survey, told the LA Times.

So could a substantial portion of southern California someday actually slide into the ocean like we see in the movies?

The scientists that were involved in this study say that the answer is yes…

Cal State Fullerton professor Matt Kirby, who worked with the Leeper on the study, said the sinking would occur quickly and likely result in part of California being covered by the sea. “It’s something that would happen relatively instantaneously,” Prof Kirby said. “Probably today if it happened, you would see seawater rushing in.”

Let us hope that we have as much time as possible before anything like this actually happens. But scientists are also telling us that a tremendous amount of seismic tension has built up in southern California, and that this tension could cause a major earthquake at any time. In fact, in my recent article about why people are moving out of California, I included a quote from an ABC Los Angeles story about how researchers are warning that a major earthquake in southern California is “way overdue”…

A recently published study reveals new evidence that a major earthquake is way overdue on a 100 mile stretch of the San Andreas Fault from the Antelope Valley to the Tejon Pass and beyond. Researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey released the results of the years-long study warning a major earthquake could strike soon.

Today, more than 38 million people live in the state of California, and as a population density map of the state shows, much of the population is concentrated along the coastline…

So if large sections of the California coast did end up plunging into the ocean, what would the death toll be?

Would it be in the millions?

And what would such a disaster mean for the rest of the country?

The west coast of the United States sits along “the Ring of Fire”. Roughly encircling the Pacific Ocean, this vast seismic zone contains approximately 75 percent of the active volcanoes in the world and it produces more than 80 percent of all major earthquakes.

In other words, anyone that lives near the Ring of Fire would be foolish to assume that they are immune from massive natural disasters.

In 2011, a major earthquake along the Ring of Fire on the other side of the Pacific Ocean caused a massive tsunami to wash inland in Japan for many, many miles.

If such a thing were to happen in Los Angeles or San Francisco, the death and destruction would be on a scale that would be absolutely unimaginable.

When the big Hollywood film entitled “San Andreas” came out in 2015, a lot of people mocked the idea that the things portrayed in that film could ever happen in real life.