The Los Angeles Times reports that in San Bernardino and Riverside counties these last three weeks there was a seismic storm that unleashed more than 1,000 small earthquakes.

To some, the “swarmageddon” 40 miles east of downtown Los Angeles brought fear that a bigger threat was coming. To others, as long as they didn’t feel a shake, it was easy to just put it out of their minds, which has become a typical reaction in quake country.

But swarms of small quakes — especially ones near major fault lines like the San Andreas — are potential warnings.

“I would redefine normal as: You should still be prepared for a large earthquake,” U.S. Geological Survey research geophysicist Andrea Llenos said. “We do know a big earthquake is going to happen” — just not when and where.

“Any time you have an increase in the number of small earthquakes,” Llenos said, “you’re likely to increase the likelihood of a slightly larger earthquake happening.”

And even though there’s only a chance any particular earthquake will trigger something far worse, experts say, it’s important to not completely relax.

When a swarm hit central Italy in 2009, according to seismologist Tom Jordan, one civil protection official sought to calm residents’ jitters by telling reporters: “The scientific community tells us there is no danger, because there is an ongoing discharge of energy. The situation looks favorable.”

But a few hours after a magnitude 3.9 earthquake jolted the town of L’Aquila that April 5, a magnitude 6.3 struck, killing more than 300 people.

And a magnitude 7.3 earthquake off the east coast of Japan on March 9, 2011, that led some people to be complacent when, two days later, the historic magnitude 9 earthquake struck.

And some people had ignored protocol and failed to immediately evacuate before the catastrophic tsunami hit.

At least three times in California’s modern history, large earthquakes have occurred in the wake of smaller temblors:

The last mega-earthquake in Southern California struck Jan. 9, 1857, sending extreme shaking everywhere from Monterey County south to Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties. The main shock, at 8:24 a.m., was preceded in the Monterey County area by a magnitude 5.6 earthquake, and a magnitude 6.1 earthquake the hour before that.

The earth was shaking in the months before the Oct. 17, 1989, earthquake in the Santa Cruz Mountains interrupted the World Series between the Oakland A’s and San Francisco Giants — with a magnitude 5.4 quake two months earlier and a magnitude 5.3 in June 1988. Many scientists believed those quakes were “preshocks” related to the Loma Prieta earthquake, which killed 63 people that October.

The magnitude 6.1 Joshua Tree quake on April 22, 1992, rocking high-rise office buildings in downtown Los Angeles more than 100 miles away, is believed to have triggered on June 28 the magnitude 7.3 Landers earthquake in the Mojave Desert, strong enough to send shaking to Denver; and a few hours later, a magnitude 6.3 hit Big Bear. According to a study published in 1993 by researchers, the Joshua Tree temblor began “the most substantial earthquake sequence to occur in California in the last 40 years.”

Some dismiss these recurring earthquake swarms because each quake is low intensity, and write them off as an irritant of living in earthquake country. And they say that there are slim chances of anything happening.

But as the examples above show, seismic activity can be connected and a harbinger of something worse coming. Could it be, that the swarming tremors in a “swarmageddon”  would be a warning that a more severe seismic storm is coming.

The Biblical prophecies (Matthew 24, Luke 21) foretell that earthquakes will be a sign of the Last Days indicating the coming end of the age and the nearing appearance of Jesus Christ.

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