Firefighters battle an electrical fire in a mobile home park in Ridgecrest, California, the United States, on July 6, 2019 following a 7.1-magnitude earthquake on July 5. (AFP Photo)

LOS ANGELES, July 9 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) on Tuesday dismissed the rumor that the state of California will eventually fall into the ocean after major earthquakes.

"There is nowhere for California to fall," said the USGS in a release.

California is firmly planted on the top of Earth's crust in a location where it spans two tectonic plates, according to the USGS.

The San Andreas Fault System, which crosses California from the Salton Sea in the south to Cape Mendocino in the north, is the boundary between the Pacific Plate that includes the Pacific Ocean, and North American Plate that includes North America.

These two plates are moving horizontally, slowly sliding past one another. The Pacific Plate is moving northwest with respect to the North American Plate at approximately 46 millimeters per year, according to the USGS.

Photo taken with a mobile phone shows a road damaged by earthquakes in Trona of California, the United States, July 6, 2019. (Xinhua/Tan Yixiao)

The strike-slip earthquakes on the San Andreas Fault are a result of this plate motion.

There is nowhere for California to fall, however, Los Angeles and San Francisco will one day be adjacent to one another, said the USGS.

Southern California was shaken by two powerful earthquakes successively last week, a 6.4 magnitude on July 4 and a 7.1 on July 5.

The two earthquakes caused widespread structural damage to roads, waterlines and gas lines, and raised some concerns for whether other big ones will hit the region again and trigger more damages.