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Earlier this week, an earthquake coming in with a magnitude of 5.2 shook Bakersfield and other parts of southern California. The earthquake, which happened Tuesday evening, came in as the strongest in Southern California in the last three years. The epicenter was specifically just outside of Lamont, California, a city that borders Bakersfield. The Los Angeles Fire Department sent up helicopters after the rumblings ended in order to survey the damage done around the city. The epicenter was nearly 90 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, but nonetheless people reported feeling the jolts of the shaking throughout the city, and across much of Los Angeles county overall.

The earthquake set off a massive chain reaction of aftershocks, with over two dozen being registered.

Each of the many aftershocks came in with a magnitude ranging from 2.5 to 4.5. According to the United States Geological Survey, or USGS for short, three aftershocks were in the 4 and up range in magnitude, about nine were in the 3 point range of magnitude, and the rest were at 2.9 or lower. Even expert seismologists were shocked by the amount of aftershocks that followed this earthquake. They expressed that the magnitude of the aftershocks was within normal range, but the amount was quite high for the short amount of time in which they occurred.

Seismologists suggested that people within LA felt the earthquake as much as they did due to the basin effect.

Los Angeles is a basin in the geographical sense. It is a bowl that essentially dips into the earth. When it comes to earthquakes, basins tend to feel them more. Basins are softer land, by nature, which causes the shaking feeling to be more significant.

According to further reports about this earthquake, the event was not associated with any known fault. Some were worried due to the fact that the epicenter was near the epicenter of an earthquake that rattled the state in 1952 with a magnitude of 7.5. If these two quakes had shared a fault, concern would rise about what this could mean for the future. As is, concern was high that this would be a foreshock, with an even bigger quake expected to hit shortly after. However, seismologists are unable to predict if this is the case but have stated that most foreshocks precede the bigger shocks by less than an hour and after three days are considered separate seismic events.