Loma Prieta Periodic Comet Machholz 1 96P/Machholz on May 12, 1986. The first official West Coast Messier marathon was conducted from this site in March 1979. The epicenter of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake was near the mountain. The mountain was the longtime site for the transmitter tower of San Jose television station KNTV (from 1955 to 2005). It moved its transmitter northwest to San Bruno Mountain in September 2005, after it became the Bay Area's NBC affiliate. Loma Prieta is the tallest peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains and it is common to see snow on the mountain during the winter.
Earthquake prediction "resoundingly debunked". Probably the most celebrated seismo-electromagnetic event ever, and one of the most frequently cited examples of a possible earthquake precursor, is the 1989 Corralitos anomaly. In the month prior to the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake measurements of the earth's magnetic field at ultra-low frequencies by a magnetometer in Corralitos, California, just 7 km from the epicenter of the impending earthquake, started showing anomalous increases in amplitude. Just three hours before the quake the measurements soared to about thirty times greater than normal, with amplitudes tapering off after the quake. Such amplitudes had not been seen in two years