[Island Chris]

There was a M6.5 strike-slip earthquake offshore Northern California. It is located on or near the Mendocino transform fault between the Juan de Fuca and Pacific plates. This transform is right lateral and the nodal plane parallel to the transform indeed shows right-lateral.

There is one M4.7 aftershock along the transform. The M6.5 was a few hours before the Solomon Islands quake (I may be confused with local times)


http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/e...ent-tensor

Chris

[marc / berkeley]

Hi Chris!

It does look intriguing, I'll grant you that. It's going to be an interesting place to watch for activity over the next 30 days.  I am also similiarly interested if the moment tensor solution is correct.  A lot of folks along the Marin penninsula claim they actually felt the M6.5.  Could they have only felt the normal component of the event? That seems unlikely.

A sidebar:

I also happened to glance at Ryan's website, Petra has been a proponent of a new type of remote triggering.  She proposes that one large events  can trigger an event on fault systems far away, but not through the traditional p-waves.  Looking at the recent soloman Islands event, it was primarily a thrust type of quake. Petra claims this could affect faults in the Bay Area.

Petra mentioned that the remote triggering effect comes from the L & R waves. So the L impacts, assuming a horizontal component would have to be transmitted beneath the ocean, whereas the R waves could be transmitted via ground and water or in this case, ocean to other fault systems.  These waves typically are transmitted in packs of three, making them three times more effective at remote triggering the just the one hit generated by a p-wave.  These waves are typically transmitted line of site (somewhat forced to the curvature of the earth, I suppose), to other fault systems which can then advance the time a quake might trigger.  It's an interesting theory, or work in progress worth mentioning.