away in California.This is according to scientists who took measurements from the fault over two decades.
Reporting in the journal Nature, the team found that small "repeating earthquakes" became more frequent as the San Andreas Fault weakened.
This pattern, they say, could help to forecast earthquakes in the future, something that is currently impossible.
The team, led by Taka'aki Taira, of the University of California at Berkeley, studied a section of the San Andreas Fault near Parkfield, which is sometimes called the "earthquake capital of the world".
The area has long been studied by earthquake researchers and it contains a fixed array of seismometers called the high resolution seismic network.
Dr Taira, who was based at Washington DC's Carnegie Institution when he carried out the work, used measurements from these highly sensitive seismometers, some of which are several kilometres below the Earth's surface.
read more
