There was a M3.3 30 km west of San Clemente Island. There is not a lot of seismicity that far west, but GPS data show that there is a lot of plate motion even farther west: 4-5 mm/yr west of San Nicolas Island (e.g., beavan et al JGR 2002, Dixon et al., 2000 (geophysical res letters?). The area of the quake looks to be in San Nicolas Basin or onto Tanner Bank. Tanner Bank is a part of a giant anticline that formed in the last few million years. San Nicolas basin has smaller (5 km across) contractional anticlines verging the other way (NE). Somewhere in the area is supposed to be a strike-slip fault that separates the thick Cretaceous-Paleogene strata (100+ to 30 million years more or less, for those of you who don't know the time scale on the west from areas in the east that don't have these strata. But, Calvin Lee's Ph.D. thesis shows that erosion is involved in removing the strata, so it is no so clear whether this fault is important (I think its called the East Santa Cruz Basin fault, but I'd have to check).

It will be interesting to see the focal mechanism...Chris