Chris,
No, we pretty much agree. I was just not clear. I meant hypothetically there could be no fault; that it is imaginable, even if not likely and in any case it is not possible (as you mentioned in the India case) to demonstrate.

Don,

"I canft agree with you... The fault is there whether we know about it or not... You donft have to have a quake to get a fault. You have to have a quake to indicate there is a fault there... I know of only one instance of where there may be a fault in the making. This is in Southern California. It is left lateral strike slip fault. There is some debate about this."

Still, since more than 98% of >2M quakes are not located, it is speculative to say that those forming new faults are rare. You could even have two epicenters in one place creating two separate faults at different angles. And for existing non-plate-boundary faults, there had to have been the first earthquake that created the fault.

Ara