Supercomputers Simulate 800,000 Years of California Earthquakes to Pinpoint Risks Massive earthquakes are rare events—and the scarcity of information about them can blind us to their risks, especially when it comes to determining the danger to a specific location or structure. Scientists are now working to improve the calculations of danger by combining maps and histories of known faults with the use of supercomputers to simulate potential shaking deep into the future in California. The method is described in an article just published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. “People always want to know: When is the next ‘Big One’ coming,” said coauthor Bruce Shaw, a seismologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “Chaos always gets in the way of answering that question. But what we can get at is