Tiny earthquakes happen every few minutes in southern California

NPR -   Detecting very small earthquakes is notoriously difficult. The rumbling of the ocean, a passing car or even the wind can feel a lot like a minor quake to the sensors that blanket seismically active parts of the U.S.

That's a problem for scientists who rely on data about all the earthquakes in a region to study what triggers the biggest, most destructive ones.

Now, a team of scientists says they have found a way to accurately detect tiny earthquakes, and they have published a new, more comprehensive list of quakes that occurred over a recent 10-year period in Southern California. The work was published  in the journal Science.

The team relied on data from a network of about 400 seismic sensors in California, spread from the U.S.-Mexico border up through the southern part of the state. Those sensors continuously measure movement in the Earth's crust, looking for evidence of quakes. During the decade from 2008 to 2017, scientists had already identified 180,000 earthquakes in the region.