People with rust in their arteries (like me) probably remember a song that was briefly popular in 1969.

Day after day
More people come to L.A
Shhh! Don’t you tell anybody
The whole place slippin’ away
Where can we go
When there’s no San Francisco?
Shhh! Better get ready
To tie up the boat in Idaho

Fifty-seven years later, California is still there, but that may be changing before more years slip by.

A new study led by Dr. Liliane Burkhard of the Division of Space Research and Planetary Sciences (WP) at the Physics Institute of the University of Bern examined 1,000 years of earthquake activity along the southern San Andreas and San Jacinto fault systems to estimate current stress levels at Cajon Pass. The international research team included scientists from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, the U.S. Geological Survey Earthquake Science Center in Pasadena, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

Their findings indicate that tectonic stress in the region has reached, and in some locations surpassed, levels seen at any point during the past millennium…

“So not only is it concerning that the stresses are reaching historic highs,” says Burkhard, “but also that the relative stress conditions between the two fault systems are approaching the range we associate with major ruptures crossing both faults simultaneously—and that is a scenario with much larger consequences for the region.”

Here is the song that occurs to me whenever I read a scientific report that reminds me why I don’t spend time in California.