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Originally Posted by BombaySapphire3
Actually don't all these quakes help take pressure off the San Andreas maybe saving us from a big one up here or in El Lay for at least a few more years?I'm no expert but that is what I seem to remember hearing.
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http://www.skywise711.com/SeismicFAQ...html#Ismallbig
As a sidenote, there's a phenomenon now being studied known as "stress triggering." The upshot seems to be that all earthquakes -- large or small -- relieve stress at some point along a fault. But through a complex series of processes, future quakes (aftershocks or mainshocks) can theoretically be triggered along the fault -- nearby or distantly -- or even on adjacent faults. And as Brian says in his FAQ, it would take thousands of small quakes to spend the accumulated stress of a major quake (in a correlation that depends on the magnitude of quake).
Look at the two humongous quakes in the Sunda Trench within the past year -- they occurred within three months of each other & within only 110 miles of each other.
I recommend this book: it's cheap, currently in print, etc. It's called "Earthquake Science: What We Know & Don't Know About Earthquakes" by Susan Elizabeth Hough (a seismologist with the USGS in Pasadena).