Hi Chris,

Your comments regarding terminology appear to be at least correct in part and perhaps completely correct.

I considered using the word hypothesis and just thought that some site visitors might regarding it as being "arrogant." So I used “theory” instead. Remember, these are somewhat casual and informal discussions, not formal scientific publications.

Not being a geologist I generally thought that there is not too much difference between “stress” and “strain.” And I thought that for this application, “strain” might be more appropriate. Perhaps, it is not.

Regarding the hypothesis, this is a more detailed explanation.

Tectonic plates are for the most part constantly moving in one direction or the other relative to one another. And they all have to fit in some position in the crust of the Earth. So, when one moves a good distance it puts pressure of some sort on others. The reasons that probably most earthquakes occur is because the other tectonic plates don’t want to move until the stress level gets so great that the rock layers the two tectonic plates share abruptly fracture and release the stored energy as shockwaves etc.

When the plates are really hesitant to move, in my mind at least I picture it as being a type of logjam that starts to interfere with the movement of plates around the globe. And at certain locations on the planet there can be enough transferred stress that local fault zones might start to have low magnitude earthquakes.

So, the hypothesis is that the stress buildup logjam in Japan might have resulted in some stress being applied to the fault zones in Arkansas. And they responded by having low magnitude earthquakes.

I do in fact suspect that this might have happened. I have been detecting tremendous numbers of low intensity EM Signals since around June of 2010. And in the weeks after the Japan earthquake they dramatically decreased in number. I suspect that many of them might have been linked with Arkansas seismic activity. And since they matched the time frame of the Japan earthquake it causes me to suspect that the approaching earthquake might in fact have been causing stress to be placed on the Arkansas fault zones.

If this is correct then perhaps the only thing that people would observe is a gradual decrease in Arkansas seismic activity now that the Japan earthquake has occurred. And the original increase would have started around last June.

I haven’t checked too much on this. But I thought that I saw that the Arkansas activity did get moving along fairly strongly last Summer. Additionally, there might have been earlier periods of Arkansas seismic activity that matched temporary periods of high stress in the Japan fault zone area.

At this point the only thing that I can propose is that if the Arkansas and Japan earthquakes were linked in that way then there should now be a fairly permanent reduction in the Arkansas seismic activity. So, we can watch to see if that happens.