Yo Petra-did you see my compliment on your central Africa earthquake the other day?

There was a 3.1 offshore southern california. The offshore fault map shown on the USGS EQ page is so poor as to be almost meaningless. The earthquake was somewhere around the offshore Palos Verdes or San Diego Trough/San pedro basin faults, which are right-lateral faults. However, you can have thrust EQs in this area, as shown by the 1986 Oceanside earthquake, about a M 5 1/2. GPS geodetic data show that San Clemente Island is moving to the NW 5 or 6 mm/yr with respect to Palos verdes (e.g., Larson, 1993), so that there can be about that much right-lateral slip combined on the San Clemente fault, San Diego trough-San Pedro basin fault zone, Palos Verdes-Coronado Bank fault zone, and offshore Newport Inglewood-Rose Canyon fault zone. Actually, you may be able to have a little more slip than that, because of locked faults and the Newport-Inglewood and Palos verdes faults being east of Palos Verdes peninsula.
By Comparison, the San Andreas has a maximum of about 35 mm/yr slip in central California. This slip splits up onto several faults in the Bay area.

I'm headed to Scripps on Weds for a SCEC meeting on the community fault model Thurs and Friday. I guess we will be in a 3D visualization "cave". The fault model will be eventually available on the web at a harvard address. Actually, it is already there, but the link address is not public yet. There is a unix script that converts the format of the fault representation to one that can be read by a free software, which can be downloaded from that site. I'll let you know when the site becomes public. Chris