Hi Barbara, Gee, my evil twin is tempted to make a crack about getting science from Fox News. No, I don't get my science from MSNBC: I'm getting information from CNN and the ABC and NBC and CBS evening news, and also from posts here with links, and USGS, NOAA, and IRIS sites on internet. All funded by big goverment by the way. CNN is doing a better job than for Sumatra.

OK, when I came onto this page a decade ago it was at the suggestion of Lowell Whiteside, and a lot of his work was on this kind of distant triggering. Yes, 1905 and 1906 were big years for Great Quakes. I think there may have been 2 in one day (Columbia was one?) I've posted here that Whiteside sent me his Comps report in 1990 that included P and S wave triggering: I have to dig this up and make sure I recall correctly. I am pretty sure that almost all seismologists would say "nonsense" at that time but not after Landers in 1992, where the effect was obvious and then widely published. It is accepted that various Major and Great quakes have triggered small quakes at great distances (Landers, Denali, others).

But, Roger ran a bunch of tests here on various triggering effects and came up with a big nothing. I suggested how he might do the graphs and I looked at them. There could be a small effect but it just does not seem that there could be a big effect. Despite a test by Roger that said no, it seems to me that there are clusters of M6 quakes in the world: I posted below that there were M6+ quakes in 6 widely separates area between March 6 and the M9 on March 9. Then I posted that I expected a continuation of this global activity with more than average M6 quakes. As usual on this kind of thing, I was wrong: if you don't count the quakes on west coast of Honshu and near Mt Fuji, there has been only about one M6+

Winchester has the wrong time: he says 250 years ago: the "orphan tsunami in Japan" from a Casacadia megathrust was in 1700 and my math says 311 years ago. I don't know of any reason why the wave would be higher than in Japan, although theer is likely a Cascadia record of runup heights (I think the Japan tsunami this past week was likely more than 10 m in places, just from looking at the videos including one where you could see the vegetation stripped off in a line on the sides of a valley).

Chris