Hi Canie,

Glad to see Chris Scholz is still working. I thought he had retired. Interesting article, but it says nothing about subduction earthquakes, which cause some of those huge earthquakes. They are deep versus having a long fault system.

I guess their theory does not apply to quakes such as the one in February of this year in Olympia where there was an obvious number of precursory earthquakes and also later known that the entire area had been having a slow slip for quite awhile before the quake struck. For those interested in prediction it should have been a textbook case for foresight versus hindsight.

I have a bit of a problem with Scholz. For quite awhile he had a piece on the web where he was bashing the USGS about instrumenting the Loma Prieta EQ site before the quake arrived as it seemed immenent. He says the lack of data collection created a problem in obtaining data for further fault study. Actually, another scientist of great reknown said it didn't matter because the quake would have knocked out all of the seismographs because they would have been to close for such a large quake. One of them some distance away was knocked out, so I am certain he was right. Interesting enough when I mentioned to a scientist I knew that airing one's dirty laundry in public wasn't such a good idea, considering they are collegues, the article was removed from the web.

For matters of that nature, I don't care if they wish to argue theory and such, but they should do it in other mediums, like right up in each others faces. Or keeping with more conventional methods, write a paper about.

As there is little new in geo-sciences generally, I'm always pleased to have scientists turn the wheel of process anyday.

Petra