Get ready for the big one.

That’s a refrain Californians have heard for years, but this time one scientist is putting a number on it.

There’s a 1% chance a big quake will strike next year on the Southern section of the San Andreas Fault, according to Ross S. Stein, Ph.D., CEO of Temblor Inc., a catastrophe risk modeling company based in Redwood City, Calif.

That may not sound that high, but it’s a lot higher than previously believed.

Stein and scientist Shinji Toda, Ph.D., with Tohoku University, published a paper that went out to the public this week in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, “Long- and Short-Term Stress Interaction of the 2019 Ridgecrest Sequence and Coulomb-Based Earthquake Forecasts.”

The crux of the paper is that the 2019 Ridgecrest quakes stressed the Garlock Fault, which if it ruptured in a large shock, would likely trigger a San Andreas earthquake north of Los Angeles.

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