Could the Recent Pacific Megaquakes Trigger a West Coast Temblor?
In the past 15 months several devastating earthquakes have rumbled beneath the Pacific. In February 2010 a magnitude 8.8 temblor slammed central Chile; this past September a magnitude 7 quake walloped Christchurch, New Zealand, leading to a magnitude 6.3 aftershock this past February. The magnitude 9 megaquake that devastated Japan March 11 was the fifth largest in the last 110 years.Some may wonder if these quakes are linked. A high-magnitude earthquake in Japan, one notion goes, might redistribute stress in Earth's crust, subsequently triggering another temblor in the following months or years--a quake that could even strike as far away as the western shores of the U.S. But the apparent clustering of major seismic events that take place thousands of kilometers apart is probably coincidental. That the Japanese and Chilean megaquakes occurred only 13 months apart is a statistical fluke, the chance alignment of two independent events. "Over great distances,...